The Ghana Infectious Disease Centre has been connected to the national grid by the Electricity Company of Ghana, ECG, in support of the national fight against COVID-19.
ECG’s intervention means that the 100-bed capacity facility is set for treatment and management of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases in the country.
The ultra-modern facility worth US$7.5million was funded by the Ghana COVID-19 Private Sector Fund, which saw 536 patriotic and industrious Ghanaians building the project to support government’s efforts in combating the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
To power the facility, the Electricity Company of Ghana, ECG, has also provided it with a GHS320, 000 worth of transformer.
The Managing Director of ECG, Kwame Agyeman-Budu, says the 500kv transformer will serve the facility immensely.
“We contacted our engineers and in two and half days, we were done. As a matter of fact, it started on Monday, and we finished everything last night, Tuesday, 28th July, 2020, and we just made a few finishing touches and energized it this morning. This is just to show our support to the trustees, to the centre and also to the government that indeed ECG is here to support any initiative that will support the entire nation.”
“This cost us GHS320,00 and initially, the Centre requested 800kv transformer, but when our Engineers sat down to analyze the load, we realized that, the load frontal was around 300kv to 400kv so we decided to give them 500kv load so everything is taken into consideration,” he said.
Mr. Agyeman-Budu however told journalists that the intervention will not affect the finances of ECG in any way, adding that government’s temporary free electricity supply to consumers has also not taken a toll on their operations.
“We will not be affected at all because we already had these materials in stock, and even though it was not budgeted for, we have some miscellaneous fund that we’ve put aside in case of emergencies. However, some of the challenges we faced with the temporary free electricity supply was data issues and at times the network also fails us because if the customer goes to the vending station and the data is not already there, it makes it difficult to determine. But we’ve been dealing with them on case to case basis and so far our customers are satisfied with what we’ve done,” he added.
