African Center for Energy Policy (ACEP) has predicted that Ghanaians will soon pay more for electricity consumption.
ACEP said electricity tariff will soon go up significantly as the Ghana GRID Company (GRIDCo) battles to repair and replace its obsolete equipment.
The Executive Director of ACEP, Ben Boakye, said the situation has put the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) in a very difficult position.
“There is no debate about that. This is a major tariff review year, so PURC I can imagine the difficult situation they may be in, where the grid is not stable and yet you have to review the tariff,” he said on Joy News.
“It’s going to be a very tough decision for PURC to take. I can guarantee that tariff would go up significantly. If it doesn’t go up then government has to raise money, but I didn’t see it in the budget.”
In recent weeks, there have been several power outages across the country, to the frustration of Ghanaians.
Earlier in March, there was a nationwide power outage as a result of a total system collapse in the transmission network.
Mr. Boakye noted that there’s been very little investment in the sector for several years, which has led to the current situation.
“We know that lack of investments into the transmission system is what is occasioning the trips that we are seeing today; and it’s been beckoning for a while.
“I mean we [ACEP} have maintained that electricity is business, so you have to treat it as such and allow the value chain to be able to pay for itself.”
“You generate, you transmit, you distribute, you raise money at that end to feed the whole industry [power]. And for so long we’ve been struggling to pull money from the distribution-end to be able to pay for transmission and generation.
“And that problem is really what we have to deal with, and the commitment to deal with that hasn’t really been enough,” the ACEP Executive Director added.
