Mr Jonathan Amoako Baah, the Chief Executive of the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo), has said the power outage experienced in most parts of the country on Tuesday, was to excess power supply.
He said the thermal plants in the country, failed to operate after power that was previously being supplied to Côte d’Ivoire was reversed back to Ghana’s system.
“At exactly 2:37 pm there was a major system disturbance following power from Côte d’Ivoire which led to the disruption of all power plants in Ghana,” Mr Amoako Baah said.
The power outage affected most parts of the country, including the Western, Central, Northern, Greater Accra and Ashanti Regions.
Further explaining how the outage occurred, Mr Amokao said, “This happened when we were exporting about 100 Megawatts from the Ghana system to the Côte d’Ivoire system. All of a sudden Côte d’Ivoire lost their lines to Mali which means that there was over-generation in Côte d’Ivoire and they started exporting power to us.
“The power plants in Ghana are sensitive to power fluctuations [and] this led to the shutdown of the thermal plants in Ghana which caused the outage,” he added.
The CEO went on to explain that, there was no way the problem could have been anticipated for any rectification measures to be carried out.
The power outage plunged the said affected parts of the country into total darkness for several hours on Tuesday.
ECG, however, issued a communique in the latter parts of the day, explaining to consumers the reason for the power outage they were experiencing.
