The Minister of Energy and Green Transition, John Jinapor, has appealed to Ghanaians to exercise restraint following Thursday morning’s power outage that affected parts of Accra and other parts of the country.

🇬🇭 Here's What Happened

The Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) attributed the disruption to a fault on the Akosombo-Volta transmission line.

Speaking at the commissioning of a new office complex for the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC), Dr Jinapor explained that the latest outage was linked to a temporary arrangement put in place after the Akosombo transmission infrastructure was severely affected by an earlier incident.

He said the government had initially been faced with two options: shut down the Akosombo plant for about six months to rebuild the control centre completely or introduce a temporary system to allow the plant to continue supplying power while permanent works were undertaken.

📌 Key Details

According to him, the government opted for the temporary arrangement to avoid keeping the Akosombo plant offline for an extended period.

“As ministers had a decision to make and I decided that we should go by the temporal measure whilst we put in place a permanent solution.”

Dr Jinapor said engineers had since been working to maintain the temporary system, which had largely supported the power supply over the past few months.

However, he explained that the arrangement remains vulnerable to frequency disturbances, which can trigger the automatic shutdown of the Akosombo facility to protect the wider power system.

“Because the temporal measure occasionally, when there's some frequency disturbance, it takes off Akosombo immediately to protect the system.”

The Minister said work on a permanent control centre and related infrastructure is progressing and is expected to be completed next month.

📰 Source: Joy Online Ghana