Institute of Energy Security, IES, is predicting unstable energy supply throughout the nation within the coming days if authorities doesn’t resource electrical energy service suppliers.
President Nana Akufo-Addo, on Thursday, 09 April 2020, revealed that the government will fully cover the payments of low-income consumers of electricity for April, May and June 2020.
The remaining consumers who fall outside of this class will enjoy a 50 percent discount in the price of electricity for a similar period. These are a part of measures to cushion Ghanaians as the coronavirus take a toll on numerous points of the financial system.
The Analysis and Coverage Analyst on the Institute, Raymond Nuworkpor, in a Citi Information interview stated the already present challenges within the sector could also be compounded if funds will not be offered urgently to help the roll out of presidency’s intervention.
“For this policy to come to effect, the government must first make available resource funding to the three entities in the supply chain so that they will be able to give us consistent power. Unfortunately, we don’t know whether funds have been made available to them and that’s the problem now because even before the President made the announcement, we understood that, the IPPs and the rest were unable to get gas supply from Nigeria because of liquidity challenges and Jubilee [field] too is unable to produce enough gas to power our thermal plants so if the government doesn’t make funds available to these entities, it will be difficult.”
The entities within the supply chain are the Ghana Grid Company, the Northern Electricity Distribution Firm and the Electricity Company of Ghana.