The Electricity Company, Ghana is to increase tariffs to an appreciable level soon to enable it to meet its increasing cost of distribution and replacement of technical equipment.
The acting Managing Director of the company, Cephas Gakpo, told the Times on Friday that out of an amount of 994 million dollars the company requested from government in 2007 to meet its technical challenges, only 430 million dollars was released for disbursement over the past three years.
“There is a shortfall of about 400 million dollars so how can we operate efficiency?” he asked, arguing, there is the need to get shortfall in revenue by adjusting tariffs upwards.
Mr Gakpo said the seven per cent annual demand rate for electricity from the ever expanding population meant that the ECG must redouble its plants and equipment acquisition every 10 years.
“There is not enough money to do investment to match the demand of electricity by the people,” he said. “That is why there are unacceptable levels of service delivery by the ECG,” he admitted.
He declined to say the rate of the impending upwards adjustment in tariffs but said, “the rate proposed to PURC may be reviewed.”
Mr Gakpo said the new tariffs would enable ECG to cover its genuine operating cost and meet the demand growth of the people. He agave the assurance that, the tariff increases would first have to be approved by the Public Utility Regulatory Commission (PURC) and urged the public to bear with the ECG when the tariffs were introduced.
The managing director disclosed that about 13 per cent of power purchased from the Volta River Authority (VRA) was stolen by customers “through plain theft and illegal connections.”
For example, Mr Gakpo said, the ECG last year purchased 6,052 million units of power from the VRA at GH˘419 million and sold it at GH˘656 million. He admitted that policing the over two million ECG customers to prevent theft was an onerous task and called on the public to play their watchdog role by reporting every theft to the police.
“The public must report those stealing energy to the police timeously because those stealing it are imposing extra burden on genuine tariff payers,” he said.
On his views about Ghana constructing nuclear plants to generate more and cheaper energy, Mr Gakpo said, “I do not recommend nuclear plants for the country, because safety precautions that exist elsewhere do not exist here.” He said the discovery of large deposits of gas in Ghana was enough to support power generation.
