The Minority in Parliament has proposed some solutions that the government could adopt in managing the energy crisis.
Member of Parliament for Yapei Kusawgu who is also the ranking member on the Energy and Mines Committee, Mr. John Abdullai Jinapor, addressing a press conference today, Wednesday, April 28, 2021, said the current energy crisis is due to financial challenges.
He noted that GRIDCO had given six different reasons for the major national outages aside from the intermittent localised blackouts.
He said one of the ridiculous reason given was that trees had fallen on high tension pole lines.
According to him, the ECG which, recorded a profit of over 500 million cedis under former President Mahama in 2016, has posted cumulative losses of over 4 billion Cedis since the 2017 financial year.
He stated that the GRIDCO which also posted a profit in 2016, has equally taken a turn for the worst with a total comprehensive loss of over 600 million cedis as captured in their 2018 financial statement.
Due to the worsening financial position of GRIDCO, Agence Francaise de Development has had to withhold funding for a major upgrade of the national transmission line for over two years culminating in congestion of the GRID.
He then proposed ten solutions he stated could help address the energy situation.
Read the ten solutions proposed below;
- The Energy sector players must be proactive and inform (Publish a schedule) electricity consumers.
- Government must cut down on wasteful expenditure and Inject the much-needed capital into the power sector.
- Government must desist from political interference in the management of the Energy sector.
- Government and its communicators must desist from engaging in the propaganda on excess capacity and come out with a formula for absorbing capacity charges as part of operating cost.
- Power sector managers must ensure that they pursue Long term planning to ensure fuel security for generating assets at the least cost possible.
- Government must allow Independent Power Producers (IPPs) to take responsibility for their fuel supply requirements.
- Immediate steps must be taken to aggressively address ECG’s spiralling technical and commercial losses currently estimated by its worker unions at 34%
- The Ministry of Energy must conduct a comprehensive reconciliation of the total indebtedness of all players including the government and its SOEs including (GNPC, GNGC, VRA, GRIDCo, CENIT, ECG, NEDCo) in a transparent manner.
9.The Ministry of finance must take steps to utilize the $1 billion sovereign bond borrowed in 2020 to address the financial challenges of the Energy sector.
10. Government must ensure that Energy sector SOEs Publish details of their financial statements including the details and ageing of their indebtedness as well as debts owed to them on time.
By: Rainbowradioonline.com
