Parts of Ghana hit by blackouts again

Many parts of the country have been hit with widespread blackout for the second evening in one week.

Citinewsroom.com can report that there has been some system imbalances that resulted in surges in the power grid over the past two days.

GRIDCO, the system controller, is presently investigating the problem which resulted in a shutdown of bulk supply points at Mallam, Graphic among others around 7:20pm today [Wednesday].

The affected areas include Madina, Koforidua, Achimota, Kasoa, North Kaneshie, Cape Coast and other places.

The system imbalances have caused major power outages in a lot of communities with the system voltage at some sectors monitored reducing to 26KV.

Generation data available to citinewsroom.com show that power generation around  7:30pm on Wednesday was 1420MW with a Projected Peak Load of 2600MW, indicating a deficit of over 1000MW.

Power generation dropped to 1350 MW as at 8:00pm and increased to 1546MW around 9:00pm.

A large part of the country experienced a blackout of Tuesday evening.

The imbalances and the resultant surge affected the Kpong Hydro station resulting in a shutdown and an automatic restart of the facility around this same time on Monday.

The Ghana Grid Company has apologised to Ghanaians and assured that they “will continue to work with all stakeholders to provide adequate supply to customers.”

Ghanaians have subsequently taken to social media to comment on the current power situation in their respective areas.

Some social media users have been posting on the current power situation in their respective neighbourhoods.

As at 7:30pm, the term ‘dumsor’ which refers to the intermittent power outage was featuring prominently in the Ghana Twitter trends.

Grid shutdowns 

This is the fourth time in 3 years that Ghana has faced near-total grid shutdowns.

It happened in 2016, 2017 and 2019.

In all these instances, the System Operator – The Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCO) – failed to provide comprehensive reasons for the occurrences to the Ghanaian public.

Source: citinewsroom