Understanding what is going on with Ghana’s Energy Space – Part 1

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Background

Last week, while we were seriously discussing how the war in Iran is affecting us, we heard a banger of a story. There was a fire at the GRIDCo substation at Akosombo which knocked out a power station. Almost immediately, we started experiencing persistent power outages. What’s more we are in the hot season so you can imagine being in a room without electricity. More and more, the power outages are being blamed on the fire at the substation. There are reports that a total of 720MW of power has been cut from the grid, but OPE is it really that serious? 720 doesn’t seem like much.

What’s happening?

It is actually a very serious issue. But for you to grasp how serious it is, let me paint the whole picture briefly for you. When it comes to electricity generation, countries run this business in two ways. We have the consolidated way and the unbundled way. The consolidated system generates the power and sells it directly to consumers. The unbundled system is where the ones who generate power are separated from the ones who supply the consumer.
Ghana’s electricity sector is run in an unbundled way where, even though they are all government owned, we have a different company that only focuses on generating power like the VRA and others. Once it is done, it sells this generated power to GRIDCo. This company’s focus is transporting the electricity through major power lines that carry electricity across the country. Now, once GRIDCo has done this, it then sells the electricity to ECG and NEDCo whose focus is distributing it to households.

What the fire actually did

When it comes to Ghana, we get our electricity from a lot of plants across the country. At any given moment, Ghana needs about 4,338MW of electricity at its busiest. Our biggest contributor to that is the Akosombo dam which contributes about 1,020MW. The rest is produced by Takoradi (T1 & T2), Sunon Asogli, Karpowership, Bui and a few others. The important thing here is that Akosombo alone is responsible for about one in every four units of electricity powering this country. That is big. 

Now, when the power is generated at Akosombo, it needs to travel. The electricity produced is extremely powerful and before GRIDCo can push it across the country, it needs a substation to manage, control and direct that flow safely onto the national grid. When the substation control room caught fire, that critical control centre was destroyed. And here is the physics: the electricity generated by Akosombo cannot be stored currently. The moment it is generated it must flow somewhere. With the substation gone, Akosombo’s turbines had nowhere to send their power. Keeping them running would have destroyed them entirely.  So, operators had to shut the dam down completely. That is how a substation fire becomes 720MW gone from the national grid overnight.

You might survive the darkness but what about your wallet? That’s in Part 2 here