The Electricity Company of Ghana has defended its non-compliance with load management instructions from the National System Control Centre, accusing the Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) of notifying the Electricity Distributor of load management plans at short notice.
GRIDCo on March 28, complained to the Energy Minister, Dr. Matthew Opoku-Prempeh, about what they say is a blatant disregard and non-implementation of load management directives often communicated to ECG operations by the Systems Control Centre (SCC), a phenomenon GRIDCo says could threaten the national power grid and potentially lead to a system collapse.
GRIDCo further accused ECG of misinforming the public through its publication when its inaction triggers unwarranted outages requesting for the minister’s intervention to ensure cooperation from ECG.
But in a letter to the energy minister, responding to GRIDCO, cited by Starr News, the ECG says inadequacy between the time requests are received and the time these requests must be effected remains and issue.
“It is a fact that GRIDCO routinely directs ECG’s System Operators to drop load at some of our Bulk Supply Points (BSPs), but the issue has been the inadequacy between the time these requests are received and the time these requests must be effected to sustain the integrity of the power system and also for ECG to inform its customers.”, portion of the letter stated.
The ECG further chronicled how of the nearly 90% of load management requests were made less than 1 hour to the peak hours, making it nearly impossible to comply.
“It is worthy to note that, between January and March 2024, sixty-four requests were received from GRIDCo for load management. Out of this, forty were for peak periods (18:00 24:00 hrs) and twenty-four for off-peak (06:00-18:00 hrs) load management,” ECG explained.
“Out of the forty peak load requests, thirty-five (88%) of them were received within an hour to the peak period. There were on five (5No) (12%) instances where ECG received the request within 2-3 hours of the peak period.”, the letter added.
“Out of the Twenty-Four (24No.) off-peak load requests, three (3No) (13%) of them were received within 30 minutes to the off-peak period while the remaining Twenty-One (21No.) (87%) instances were received far into the off-peak period.”, it further stated.
ECG insists requests from GRIDCo for ECG to drop load which are mostly received within 30 minutes to an hour prior to GRIDCo disconnecting ECG’s feeders at the BSPs does not give ECG adequate time to plan, prepare and implement this request and more importantly inform customers about the load management request from GRIDCo.
ECG has also defended its notices to the public accusing GRIDCo of the power outages.
“On the issue of ECG publishing Customer Notices on Outages by GRIDCo, we wish to state that this is factual and an accurate description of the situation where the outages are caused by the disconnection of feeders at the BSP by GRIDCo.”, it insisted in the letter.
The ECG concluded that requests for load management from GRIDCo must be received between 3-4 hours prior to the peak or off-peak periods.
“ECG wishes to state that we will always cooperate with all relevant stakeholders including GRIDCo in order not to jeopardize the stability of the Transmission system. We however wish to reiterate our request that the Notice to our System Operators for load management should be received before 3:00pm for peak load and 4am for off-peak load management or to be received 24 hours ahead in each case, as what is happening now is no longer an emergency operation but seemingly a routine daily activity,” it concluded.
Source: Ghana/Starrfm.com.gh/103.5FM
