Power Minister sets January deadline to end ‘dumsor’
The Minister of Power, Dr Kwabena Donkor, says barring any unforeseen difficulties, the power crisis will end by the second week of January 2016.
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"We have put in measures to end the power crisis by the end of the year. The New Year promise is still on," he said, adding that “certainly by the second week in January next year and barring any unforeseen source of difficulty, the problem will not”.
Dr Donkor told the Parliamentary Select Committee on Government Assurances yesterday that although measures had been put in place to ensure that the power crisis was brought to an end by the end of the year, the nation needed not to lose sight of the fact that even after the problem had been dealt with, the power plants could develop faults which could lead to significant loss of energy.
In March, this year, the minister vowed to work towards ending the load shedding before the end of December. He promised to resign if he failed to achieve that objective.
Uninterrupted supply
Dr Donkor said whether or not the country could resolve the power challenges confronting the economy would depend on the uninterrupted operation of power generating plants.
He said any problem, such as the breakdown of generating plants, could certainly affect power generation and supply.
He said, for instance, that a fault on the FPSO Kwame Nkrumah that supplied fuel to some power plants could lead to a shutdown of those facilities, a situation which could result in a loss of at least 630 megawatts (MW) of power.
He reminded the committee that such an incident had occurred in the past and was quick to add that such problems took about a week to fix.
Assurance
The minister added that if nothing happened to the FPSO Kwame Nkrumah and the Asogli Power Plant, both of which took more than a week to fix, then the government was certainly on its way to solving the power problem by the end of the year.