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0 The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) has dismissed rumors that the Ashanti Region is experiencing a return to “Dumsor”, the colloquial term for persistent and scheduled power outages.
The region has been experiencing intermittent power outages in recent days, adversely impacting domestic and commercial consumers.
The power situation also affected the Ghana Water Company’s ability to pump water from both Owabi and Barekese dams.
But the Electricity Company of Ghana insists there is no load management or scheduled power shedding.
Speaking on behalf of all four regional managers of ECG in the Ashanti Region after a technical meeting on Wednesday, General Manager for Ashanti East, Ing Daniel Mensah-Asare, admits some residents have been experiencing what he described as power interruptions.
According to him, the interruptions are mainly due to isolated technical faults rather than a systemic shortage of power.
“It is a big no! There’s nothing like load management, load shedding, or what is popularly called Dumsor; no, there’s no ‘dumsor’ in any part of the Ashanti Region.
There’s no Dumsor in any part of Ghana.” Ing Mensah-Asare told JoyNews.
“What people are probably seeing are a few outages. They are all as a result of a fault that some of them are taking a little time for us to fix due to the nature of the fault.
But I want to say emphatically that there’s no ‘dumsor’ or there’s no load shedding or load management.” He added.
To tackle these technical challenges, Ing Mensah-Asare highlighted the reinforcement of a proactive maintenance program launched last year, dubbed “Operation Keep the Light On.”
The initiative involves defect identification, where technicians patrol distribution lines that are 11 kV and 33 kV to find potential failure points before they cause an outage, and defect correction, which involves immediate repairs to remove hazards.
In recent times, the program has been expanded to include the low-voltage networks that connect directly to individual residences.
“There’s a programme ongoing from last year that we call Operation Keep the Light On, which mandates us to go on our networks or our distribution lines, identify things that can possibly lead to an outage or can cause the light to go off.
So we are doing what we call a defect identification. Then we follow it up with defect correction.
We’ve done that on the majority of our distribution network or lines, 11 kV and 33 kV lines.
We have now expanded it to cover every 11 kV and 33 kV network. And we are even extending it to our distribution network, that one we call the low voltage network, the one that is connecting to your houses, so that we send teams or we send our men, our technicians, our engineers to go on the line and see potential things that can cause the light to go off.
Then we follow it up immediately to correct that defect.”
But it appears residents in Kumasi hit by water shortage will have to wait a little longer as ECG addresses the power concerns at the Barekese Dam.
Ing Mensah-Asare is not sure when a project to provide reliable power supply to the Barekese Dam could be completed.
“There is an ongoing project there that is going to ensure that the water company gets enough power or a reliable power to pump water for all of us and that we know and we are working very hard on it to make sure that that problem is resolved,” he said.
“It will not be too long,” Ing Mensah-Asare stressed.
The General Manager has urged the public to stay informed through ECG’s social media flyers and local radio announcements, which provide real-time updates and restoration timelines for any localized faults.
