The West African Gas Pipeline Company (WAGPCo), says it will from midnight, Saturday 28th March, 2020, to 6:00 am Sunday, 29th March, halt the supply of gas from its pipelines to the Volta River Authority, (VRA), and the Ghana Grid Company Limited, (GRIDCo) to enable it upgrade its software.
According to WAGPCo, the exercise is expected to last for six hours to upgrade its software systems to a more current one.
Speaking to Citi Business News during a facility tour at the WAGPCO plant in Tema, on Friday, Managing Director of the company, Gregory Germani, explained that the decision is to enable it to deliver efficiently to its partners along the power supply chain.
“The emergency evacuation alarms are not working. We are having to manage through an administrative control of an operator, signalling people when the site needs to be evacuated, versus the automatic alarm systems going on as well. If we do have a trip, it will take us several hours to get restarted, whereas our normal activity will be less than thirty minutes to get restarted after a trip on the system. There can be a complete shutdown to safely isolate the facility to execute this work. So, we will not have gas been delivered to VRA for six hours from midnight Saturday to 6:00 am Sunday,” he said.
It is unclear how much impact this would have on power supply within the period, but the Minister for Energy, John Peter Amewu, has urged WAGPCo to stick to the six hours’ time to ensure there is no disruption in power supply.
“We are just hoping that six hours will be six hours. It is not that six hours will be six days. That will cause a lot of disturbances, so we hope the right thing is done for Ghanaians to enjoy an uninterrupted supply of power. These times are not normal times. We expect the power because people use it to turn on their taps in terms of water supply and that is why we are here to see that it works progressively without any interruption,” he noted.
In recent times, electricity consumers have complained about irregular power supply, which GRIDCo largely blamed on lack of money to purchase fuel.
