GNPC Not Responsible For Power Outages
The Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) has denied responsibility for power supply interruptions in some parts of the country last week.
In a statement, the Corporation responded to claims that it was responsible for delayed payments for gas supply in the country thereby the power supply interruption.
It was alleged that the GNPC had failed to pay debts owed to West Africa Gas Pipeline Company Limited (WAPCO) thereby the latter’s stance against continuous supply but the GNPC on its part blamed the ECG rather.
According to the GNPC, funds received from the ECG for payment of WAPCO were not sufficient.
“Funds received by GNPC from ECG have not been sufficient to pay for the WAPCO invoices, especially in recent times. Between July and October this year, GNPC has explored every avenue possible to get ECG to honour the overdue payments to no avail this is documented in numerous letters to ECG and the Minister for Energy, requesting payments, and highlighting the potential consequences of curtailment of gas transportation services.”
It added that no response was received from the stakeholders leading up to the outages.
“It should be noted that GNPC is not responsible for the power supply challenges that occurred in the country on Thursday but has rather stepped up on many occasions to prevent gas supply interruptions by paying for gas transportation at the expense of its core operations.
“The GNPC CEO and senior management have proactively engaged WAPCO several times this year to successfully negotiate feasible payment arrangements that have prevented the curtailment of gas transportation services.”
Payment
In their statement, the GNPC explained that monies received by ECG from the sale of electricity to customers are used to pay, either directly or indirectly, all the electricity service providers downstream of the value chain, including WAPCO.
As counterparty to the Gas Transportation Agreement (GTA) with WAPCO for the transportation of gas to power plants, as per the OCTP Gas Sales Agreements (GSA) requirements, the GNPC said, it receives invoices directly from WAPCO and pays with funds from ECG.
Outage
The Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRODCo) urged Ghanaians to brace themselves for revolutionary intermittent power outages on October 26 over what it said was a gas supply shortage in their operation.
“The Ghana Grid Company Ltd, (GRIOCo), the “Operator of the National Interconnected Transmission System (NITS) informs the general public that due to limited gas supply to Tema, there will be a supply gap of 550MW at peak time.”
A few days later, the Company in a joint statement with the ECG said power supply had been fully restored following the resumption of gas supply from Takoradi for use by generating plants in Tema.
“The improved gas supply has enabled power restoration to all loads across the country,” it said in a statement dated October 28.
