Power sector may collapse if care isn’t taken – IES Boss warns

The Executive Director of the Institute for Energy Security (IES), Nana Amoasi VII, has admonished government to pay particular attention to the country’s power sector or risk collapse due to increasing debts in the sector.

Nana Amoasi stated that the power sector debt alone, without the petroleum aspect, is hovering around over US$2 billion.

“For the power sector alone, if we should add the Forex losses, the idle capacity charges, and the fuel supply that has not been paid to the invoices raised for power sales to governments, it is over 2 billion dollars. Just for the power sector, we’ve not touched on the petroleum segments of the sector,” he told Alfred Ocansey on Ghana Tonight yesterday, [February 29].

“So, we should be very careful with the way we’re handling the sector, one day it may collapse in our face,” he advised.

Nana Amoasi further indicated that the issue can partly be blamed on the government’s mismanagement of monies accrued from the energy sector debt recovery under the Energy Sector Levy Act (ESLA).

“We shouldn’t be seeing ‘dumsor’ [erratic power outages] by now because of the kind of investment that was made in the sector by the previous government. It ensured that we don’t have any questions or issues about our capacity to generate.

“What was left was financing the fuel supply and by that, they also sought to clear the debts in the energy sector introducing ESLA in December 2015. ESLA was expected to generate 650 million dollars a year so in a space of five years, that legacy debt that sat in our chest of almost 2.7 million should have been cleared…but we sat aloof, we mishandled the ESLA and we still have the energy sector debt going up, ” Nana Amoasi added.

Over the past two to three weeks, residents in several parts of the country have complained about frequent erratic power supply.

Read more:

• ‘Dumsor’ hits Ghana’s Parliament as MPs, staff get stuck in elevator
• Dumsor existed 4yrs under NDC but interventions by Akufo-Addo govt ended it – Owusu-Bempah replies Mahama

The minority in parliament has since charged the government to release a load-shedding timetable and come clean on the power situation in the country.