Energy Crisis Not Over - Mahama

President John Mahama has served notice the power crisis which hit Ghana over the years is not over yet, although it has abated.

Ghana went through an irksome moment of electricity crisis over the last three years due to short supply of gas to power thermal plants, and low water level to run the main hydro – the Akosombo Dam.

Since December 2015, the erratic electricity supply has mitigated following the arrival of the Karpower ship and other thermal additions to the national grid.

Mahama said although the problem has been arrested, Ghana is still “living dangerously because our redundancy is small.”

“Our energy challenges are not over but at least for now, we have been able to fix the problem, we are able to match demand and supply, even though we are living dangerously because our redundancy is small, not because we don’t have the generating capacity but because several of our generating assets are gas-based. We are not able to get enough gas to feed them,” Mahama told a meeting of the Council of State.

“For instance if you take the eastern generating area which is Tema, we have almost 600MW of gas-based generation but are not getting gas through the West African Gas pipeline to be able to run them. One reason is because Nigeria’s demand for gas is increasing and there is regular destruction of the gas infrastructure and so we get a certain volume today, tomorrow it drops so you cannot predict how you are running those assets,” he added.