The Public Utility Regulatory Commission (PURC) has approved an increment in water and electricity for the first quarter of 2023.
The approval will take effect from February 1, 2023, a statement issued by the PURC said.
According to the PURC statement, the end-user tariff for electricity has been raised by 29.96 percent, while the tariff for water has been raised by 8.3 percent.
“The PURC is equally mindful of the current difficult economic circumstances but notes that the potential for outages would be catastrophic for Ghana and has to be avoided. The PURC, therefore, sought to balance prevention of extended power outages and its deleterious implications on jobs and livelihoods with minimizing the impact of rate increases on consumers”.
“The Commission, therefore, decided to increase the average end-user tariff for electricity by 29.96% across the board for all consumer groups (Table i). The average end-user tariff for water has also been increased by 8.3% (Table 2). The Commission, however, approved varying rate adjustments including some reductions for selected industrial and commercial consumers as part of the ongoing restructuring of the existing water rate structure”, the statement added.
The PURC considered four factors for the upward adjustment in electricity tariffs including, the Ghana Cedi/US Dollar exchange rate, inflation, generation mix, and the weighted average cost of natural gas.
“Since the announcement of the major tariff in August 2022, these key variables underlying the rate setting have changed significantly. For example, the weighted average Ghana Cedi/Dollar exchange rate used for the major tariff review was GHS 7.5165 to the US Dollar. Since then, we have witnessed the depreciation of life Cedi against the US Dollar and other major currencies. The projected weighted average Ghana Cedi US Dollar exchange rate used in First Quarter 2023 Tariff Analysis is GHS10.5421/USD”, PURC said.
“The combined effect of the Cedi/US Dollar exchange rate, inflation and WACOG is that the utility companies are significantly under-recovering and require an upward adjustment of their tariffs in order to keep the lights on and water flowing”, the statement added.
By: Rainbowradioonline.com/Ghana
