Accra alone consumes more electricity than Togo, Benin combined—GRIDCo
According to Mr. Stephen Debrah, GRIDCo’s Dispatch Operations Manager, Accra’s demand for 800 megawatts of power is greater than the combined demand of Togo and Benin for 470 megawatts.
According to the information supplied by Mr. Debrah, Accra, as a major load center, demanded more than 23 percent of the total 3,400 megawatts that the nation needs.
Mr. Debrah stated in an interview with the Ghana News Agency that GRIDCo used to have a difficulty with evacuation when it came to transmitting bulk electricity from the Tema generation hub to the Accra load center.
Nevertheless, beginning in the fourth quarter of the previous year, the business, with assistance from the government, began replacing each of the three conductors that run between Tema and Accra.
According to him, the upgrade has made it much simpler for GRIDCo to send large amounts of electricity to Accra.
“During the course of this year, the system has remained consistent. We do not see many disruptions, but around this time last year, there were issues virtually every weekend, including power outages that were sporadic. Our engineers will tell you that Tema is a generation hub, and that Accra is a very large load center. Both of these cities are located in Ghana. In point of fact, the demand in Accra alone is greater than that in both Togo and Benin combined, as he acknowledged.
According to Mr. Stephen Debrah, who works in the field of industrialisation, the high demand for energy in Accra has a direct relationship with industry. He went on to clarify that the high electricity consumption in Ghana signifies fast economic growth.
He stated that the company’s evaluation of the high electricity formed the basis for GRIDCo to upgrade its transmission infrastructure between the generation hub and the load center to support current economic activities and also in the near future. This was done in order to ensure that the company would have enough power to meet demand.
“This is the readiness to support the growth in demand in the nation’s capital,” the speaker said. Even so, we are proceeding onward from Accra in the direction of Cape Coast. We are pleased to announce that we have put into service brand-new substations in the nation’s capital. He added that His Excellency the Vice President had had recently commissioned one of these substations in Kasoa the previous week.
In spite of the fact that Ghana’s present installed capacity for electric power is greater than 5200 megawatts, the country’s entire demand is only about 3400 megawatts, leaving room for a substantial reserve that can be promptly utilized to replace other power plants in the event of a malfunction.
Once more, he revealed that virtually all of GRIDCo’s thermal plants are now using dry gas sourced from the Western region as their fuel source, as opposed to the liquid fuel that was used in the past.
“Gas is cleaner than liquid fuel, and as a result, power plants that run on gas operate more quietly, more efficiently, and with a higher output than those that run on liquid fuel. As a result, we have a somewhat more reliable sort of power system.” We don’t face any difficulties in transferring electricity from the power producing stations to the load centers as a result of the transmission grid’s robustness and very high level of strength. Therefore, the power system has been comparatively highly secure since the fourth quarter of the previous year, as he explained.
