Despite frequent outages afflicting homes and businesses, former Ayensuano Member of Parliament Samuel Ayeh-Paye has stated that Ghana is not facing intermittent power cuts, also known as “dumsor.”
Increased power failures in recent months have prompted requests from impacted regions for a load-shedding schedule.
In a media appearance in Kumasi last month, Energy Minister Mathew Opoku Prempeh vehemently refuted the existence of “dumsor” and pushed those in favor of a load-shedding schedule to create their own.
The former Ayensuano MP claimed that although Ghana now has enough installed capacity to fulfill electricity demand, technological obstacles prevent its full use on The Big Issue on Citi FM and Citi TV.
Additionally, Mr. Ayeh-Paye refuted claims that the power outages are only the result of inadequate funding for fuel purchases that power the different production facilities and pay power producers.
What he said:
“We are having some power outages and according to the power agencies, they are saying that there is no ‘dumsor’ but technical challenges. ‘Dumsor’ happens when you don’t have enough power to produce or supply the exact peak demand that we need.
“As we speak, our peak production is around 3,600 megawatts, and what we get is a little below that and we have a shortfall, and what they [the power agencies] are saying is that the shortfall is not as a result of not having an installed capacity. The calculation is having about 5,000 plus installed capacity.”
“What the [Energy] Ministry is telling us is that the issue is not about us not having money to buy fuel, the issue is about some of the plants being under maintenance and repairs and the ECG is also telling us that they have challenges with their transformers.”
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