The recent power cuts across the country will be a thing of the past after April 12, Energy Minister, John Peter Amewu, has assured.
Mr. Amewu, who addressed the gathering at the maiden Town Hall meeting in Accra on Wednesday, said the power outages were not as a result of the lack of funds to buy fuel to power the country's plants.
He attributed the development to the relocation of a gas plant from Tema to Takoradi to engender easy and less costly transmission.
As a member of the EMT chaired by Vice President Bawumia, he took the opportunity to apologise to Ghanaians for the power cuts in recent times.
According to him, he visited the site of the gas plant where work was steadily ongoing to put the matter to rest.
“I can assure the good people of this country that work is progressing. The best thing we can do is to make sure that we speed up this process, and I can assure them that on 12th April we will complete the tie-in.”
Mr. Amewu also thanked the Ministry of Finance for making funds available to procure light crude oil, diesel and heavy fuel for the plants that rely on both gas and fuel during the period of effecting the tie-in.
Issues
“We have sufficient diesel currently in the stock of Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) and in most of these plants,” he said.
“There is the urgent need to change that installed capacity to availability, and that means a shift towards gas as a cheaper source of fuel.
He said the siting of the gas plant at Tema by the previous administration was not helpful since the country's gas reserves were at Takoradi.
“I will put the plant near to the source of gas, because when the gas travels from Takoradi to Tema, it costs about $2.7 per mmv just for the tariff.”
He revealed that the cost of transporting gas volumes from Takoradi to Tema on a monthly basis was about $60 million.
He added that stopping the flow of gas to make the changes had taken about 650 megawatts of power out of the national grid.
“We have also begun to expand the current capacity of 130 standard cubic meters of gas to over 405 standard cubic meters of gas per day.”
---Daily Guide
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