The Managing Director of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), Samuel Dubik Mahama, has stated that the company has in recent times witnessed a steady growth in its operations.
This, according to him, has partly accounted for the company’s ability to negotiate with the Chamber of Independent Power Producers (IPPs), to rescind their decision to cut down power supply by June 30 over the government’s indebtedness.
“ECG is seeing some level of growth now. It’s seeing some changes in the way it’s performing its duties, and through all of this we believe strongly we can close a certain gap,”, Mr. Dubik Mahama stated on JoyNews’ Newsfile on Saturday.
He explained that the company had for months been negotiating with the IPPs, however, this time ECG used its current performance to strike a deal with the IPPs which resolved the potential power crisis the country would have been plunged into.
“We shared certain numbers with them for certain periods moving forward. In effect, we have ring-fenced up to June debt.
“We are going to make sure that from July going forward we stay current based on some form of negotiation that we have with them concerning how power is going to be dispatched and how the energy capacity has gone. So we have a very good working formula,” he stated.
When asked if payment has been made to the IPPs, he retorted, “would you be surprised we have not given them anything?
“We have agreed on numbers across board for anybody. Everybody knows what they have to do and get back to us by the middle of the week and when they do that whatever needs to be credited to them will be credited to them immediately,” he said.
On May 28, the IPPs and distributors threatened to cut power supply to the national grid by the end of June 2023 if the government failed to settle its debt.
This could have created a huge power shortfall as the IPPs control over 65% of the available thermal generation capacity in the country.
Despite several calls by stakeholders for IPPs to reconsider its decision, it still maintained that until the 30% of the $1.73 billion owed is paid, they would shut down power.
However, on June 30, the IPPs released a statement to suspend the planned shutdown of power plants following fruitful engagements with the ECG
The Chamber had in a memo, directed its members to shut down their plants from July 1 to July 8 if the government fails to pay 30 percent of the 1.73 billion dollars owed them.
However, according to a statement released by the chamber on Friday, June 30th, the IPPs have agreed to keep operating their power plants after July 1.
As part of the understanding reached, all the IPPs have received an offer of payments from ECG to enable them to operate in the interim thereby providing the government of Ghana and ECG the needed grace period to address the outstanding arrears in the energy sector and to meet their contractual obligations.
