Utility providers want upward adjustment

• Posted on September 5, 2014September 5, 2014
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

Utility Providers in the country have called for an upward revision in tariffs owing to the rising cost of their operations.

The Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) would be reviewing tariffs next month. According to some service providers, the rapid depreciation of the cedi against major currencies had affected the cost of production.

Managing Director of GRIDCo, William Amuna, asserted that his outfit would suffer if the tariffs are maintained.

Speaking to Joy Fm yesterday in Accra, Mr Amuna commented: “If you look at our operations, we virtually import about 95 percent of whatever we need and the depreciation of the cedi definitely affects us. The biggest customer we have is ECG and they pay us in cedis. That means whatever cedis we would have to convert that to be able to get our inputs for our operations.

“The depreciation, we all know, has affected the value, we are hoping that something would be done to make up for that to be able to get our inputs. One of the projects we are doing is the System Reinforcement Project. And what we are doing is we are putting in new transmission lines to ensure that we have a stronger grid.

Apart from that, we have yet anotherproject we call the Sub-Station Rehabilitation.And this seeks to ensure that we upgrade all the existing sub-stations in Ghana. You would realise that some of the stations have been around for over 60 years and the equipment there is ageing. We definitely need to replace the equipment and so definitely we have to buy new ones,” he told journalists in Accra.

The PURC indicated that the completion of the gas processing plant at Atuabo would do a lot to reduce tariffs.

Nana Yaa Jantuah, PRO of PURC explained that “generation comes in with fuel. We might have the best plants but if you don’t have adequate fuel coming in you will not have the kind of electricity that you need.So we need to get more fuel so that is why we are all praying that the completion of Atuabo would come so that gas can flow through the pipes to Aboadze so that we can get some adequate generation.

But also the fact that we don’t have a reserve margin, any time even one plant goes down then there is a problem.

BY Samuel Boadi