ECG’s attribution of outages to overloaded transformers not true - PURC
The Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) has refuted claims by the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) that outages during peak hours of 7pm to 11pm were as a result of overloaded transformers.
This comes after the Commission, among other demands, requested data on the transformers to validate the public statements.
The ECG attributed the outages in power distribution to the overloading of some 630 distribution transformers across its operational areas which it said had been identified to be at full capacity due to increased power demand.
READ: ECG warns of more power outages during 7pm to 11pm
The PURC in a report said that analysis of the data submitted by the ECG showed that out of 715 transformers, 31 were loaded less than 70 per cent, 595 were loaded between 70-100 per cent and 89 were loaded above 100 per cent.
The report said that the data was further compared to the total outage data provided by the power distributor for the period of January to March 18, 2024.
The PURC then established that 647 outage incidents occurred between 7 pm and 11 pm during the period adding that only three outage incident were planned outages related to transformers.
“The analyses showed that the majority of the outages between 7 pm to 11 pm were as a result of load management operations by Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) and faults unrelated to overloaded transformers,” the report said.
The commission therefore concluded that ECG's attribution of the outages between 7 pm and 11 pm to transformer overload was not factually accurate.
The report added that the causes of the outages are the subject of investigations that are already being undertaken by the Commission.
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