ACEP expresses serious concern over the deepening power crisis facing Ghana. For over a month, Ghanaian households, businesses, and institutions alike, have endured escalating power outages that are disrupting livelihoods, undermining economic activity, and confidence in the power system. The situation has been significantly worsened by the recent fire at GRIDCo’s Akosombo substation, which has knocked out about 960MW of relatively cheaper and dependable generation capacity, triggering widespread load shedding.

ACEP acknowledges that some communication is being issued indicating areas expected to experience power cuts. However, this communication has been irregular, inconsistent, and unreliable, with outages frequently extending beyond announced areas and affecting communities not captured in these notices. This has deepened public frustration.

Moreover, the power system managers have attributed the wider outages in part to ongoing transformer upgrade and replacement exercises. ACEP notes, with concern, that similar explanations offered previously by ECG were found to be inaccurate following independent audits by the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC). This history makes it difficult for the public to accept the current explanations at face value. Even if transformer upgrade and replacement are genuinely underway, the scale, concurrence, and duration of the outages nationwide point to deeper systemic failures, including longstanding constraints in natural gas processing, inadequate maintenance investment, and planning inefficiencies that cannot be explained by routine technical upgrades alone.

ACEP is aware that the Minister for Energy and Green Transition is preparing to announce government’s response to the crisis. We strongly encourage the Minister to resist the pressure of reactive, short-term interventions that may appear decisive but risk generating deeper problems if not carefully assessed and transparently implemented. The history of Ghana’s power sector contains too many examples of emergency procurement decisions and contractual arrangements entered into under crisis conditions that ultimately imposed significant costs on the state and consumers.

The current crisis must instead be treated as an opportunity to confront the structural weaknesses that have made the sector chronically vulnerable, including gas supply and processing constraints, the liquidity challenges of sector utilities, the backlog of deferred maintenance, and the governance gaps that allow systemic failures to go undetected or unexplained. Sustainable resolution will require not only emergency interventions but improved planning, transparent procurement, and stronger institutional accountability across the entire power value chain.

ACEP is keenly interested in the investigation into the fire incident. A fire of that scale should not occur where proper safety systems and modern operational standards are in place. For nearly 1,000MW of capacity to be taken offline under circumstances that appear linked to managerial and systemic negligence raises serious public interest concerns. It is therefore important that the investigation is thorough, credible, and far-reaching, with clear measures to address any lapses identified and to prevent a recurrence.

Immediate Actions Required

ACEP calls for the following urgent measures:

1. Publication of a reliable load-shedding timetable. GRIDCo and the system operators must immediately provide households and businesses with a clear, credible, and regularly updated schedule for power rationing. The current irregular and unreliable communication is inadequate. Ghanaians deserve the basic courtesy of being able to plan around outages. The absence of such a timetable is itself a failure of customer service and institutional responsibility.
2. Provide a realistic timeline for supply restoration. Beyond managing the outages, the system operators must communicate transparently about when and how generation capacity will be restored to pre-crisis levels, including concrete steps being taken to address the Akosombo substation damage and any other contributing factors.
3. PURC must exercise its oversight mandate. The Commission must lead an independent, credible investigation into both the fire incident and the underlying causes of the broader power outage crisis. This is essential to restore public confidence, establish accountability, and ensure that the explanations provided by system managers are verified rather than simply accepted.
4. Full public disclosure of investigation findings. ACEP calls on government to commit, from the outset, to publishing the full findings of all investigations into the Akosombo fire and the broader outage crisis, including any evidence of negligence, misconduct, or systemic failure, and to ensuring that appropriate consequences are enforced where warranted.

Signed.

Kodzo Yaotse
Policy Lead, Petroleum & Conventional Energy