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The Chief Executive of the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) Charles Darko says the current load shedding being endured would continue through November 2012, but has assured the country that the problem would cease in December.

Addressing stakeholders at a meeting organised by the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission Tuesday in Accra, Mr Darko said his outfit is expecting the supply of power from the Takoradi three (T3) thermal plant project to augment the current power supply.

Also, he noted, the CENIT plant in Tema, which is currently being tested, would go commercial by the end of October, and would be programmed for dispatch soon.

“The situation would get better on the generation side,” he said confidently.

Mr Darko said even though supply is expected to go up, the approaching harmattan is expected to cause the temperatures to rise, and coupled with the Christmas season, demand is sure to go up.

“But in the situation with generation increase, we expect that in December we will actually have a balance, a surplus, of about 120-150 megawatts so there should be no load shedding in December for sure. In November we will just be ok, so there maybe some sporadic load shedding to address challenges that we might see on the systems, but otherwise from the programme point of view we can see this challenge come to an end at the end of the month.”

President John Mahama who was at the meeting charged energy production stakeholders to manage supply and find pragmatic solutions to end the load shedding which he anticipates will not recur after 2015.

He also took the opportunity to clarify his earlier comments about ending load shedding which he said were misconstrued.

He said he was making reference to the fact that Ghana must accelerate its gas development to avoid a complete reliance on only one source of gas - West African Gas Pipeline.

President Mahama said considering the amount of generation that would come into the system, citing the generation of 800 megawatts from gas, which “should adequately cater for Ghana’s total demand”, with the hope that by 2016, 5,000 megawatts of power would be generated, Ghana would be a net exporter of power to its neighboring countries.

“That is what I meant; I didn’t mean outages won’t occur. Of course transformers will blow, from time to time, and people will have outages. But even that is getting more efficient as we rehabilitate the transmission grid with GRIDCo changing the substations, put in new transformers and reduce the overload on transformers, outages would also be a thing of the past.”

President Mahama also asked industrial companies to ensure their power supply is managed during peak hours as a short term measure whilst the load shedding persists.

Togbe Afede XIV, a Director of the Sunon Asogli Power (Ghana) Limited, said the Electricity Company of Ghana owes the company an amount of 21 million dollars, which he said is affect its operations, describing situation as “a big problem”.

Chief Executive Officer of the Volta River Authority Kweku Awotwi says the authority is putting in place measures to provide power to industries and homes at peak hours.

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