Load shedding to end first week in May – Energy Ministry
The country’s electricity load management programme will come to an end first week of May 2013, a statement from the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum has assured.
“…based on our current peak load demand and available generation capacity, the load management programme should end by the first week of May 2013 as promised earlier by the President of the Republic”.
The statement signed by the Ministry’s Head of Communication, Mr Edward Bawah on Monday said government was concerned about a statement issued on April 29 by the West African Gas Pipeline Company WAPCO and subsequently published on many media platforms.
It quoted WAPCO’s statement which said: “WAPCO confirmed efforts towards resumption of gas transportation business by April 30, and that their “schedule has slipped because of two main challenges, contracting and line cleaner defect”.
In reaction, the Ministry said: “The Ministry wishes to state very strongly its disappointment on the turn of events particularly as this is not the very first time WAPCO is failing to deliver on its promise of resuming gas transportation to Ghana since the damage to the gas pipeline on August 28 this year.”
The statement said government spends not less than 50 million dollars in every 20 days to purchase light crude oil for the Volta River Authority (VRA) to generate power.
Notwithstanding the huge operational cost, it said, government was doing everything possible to provide uninterrupted power to households and commercial consumers.
It said despite the huge cost, government would continue to ensure that fuel was made available to VRA to generate power at all times.
The Ministry said over the past months the managers of the power subsector had been busy to take care of the power deficit created as a result of the curtailment of gas supplies to Ghana with or without the resumption of gas supplies from Nigeria.
In the past few months, it added, government had been able to bring on stream 132 Megawatts from the Takoradi 3 Thermal Power Plant (T3) which would be complemented by the commissioning of one of the units of the Bui Hydro Project (133mw) by President John Dramani Mahama on May 3.
The statement said that meant government had been able to add to the installed generation capacity a total of 265 mw which sufficiently had taken care of the 200MW shortfall as a result of Sunon Asogli not running because of lack of natural gas.
Source: GNA