The Africa Sustainable Energy Centre (ASEC) has called on the Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) to publish a comprehensive technical report on the recent widespread power outages and system disturbances across parts of the country.

ASEC said restoring electricity after the disturbances should not mark the end of the response, arguing that the public needs to know what caused the incidents and what measures are being taken to prevent a recurrence.

In a statement issued on Friday, August 21, ASEC acknowledged GRIDCo's indication that the latest disturbance was linked to a fault on the Akosombo-Volta transmission line, which triggered the automatic tripping of generating units and other power system protection mechanisms.

GRIDCo has also said a technical investigation into the incident is underway.

However, ASEC said the investigation should go beyond identifying the immediate fault and examine the wider factors that may have contributed to the disruption.

ASEC is asking GRIDCo, together with relevant power sector stakeholders, to publish a detailed post-incident report covering the immediate, underlying and systemic causes of the disturbance.

The organisation said the report should clearly distinguish between the initial fault, subsequent equipment trips, any cascading events and weaknesses that may have increased the scale of the outage.

ASEC also wants GRIDCo to explain how the power system's protection mechanisms performed during the incident.

This should include whether the protection systems operated as designed, whether there were delayed or unexpected trips, and whether the various protection systems were properly coordinated.

The energy organisation said such information would help identify weaknesses in the transmission network and ensure that lessons from the incident are used to improve the reliability of electricity supply.

ASEC is also calling for specific measures to prevent similar incidents, including improvements to transmission infrastructure, protection systems, monitoring and control systems.

It wants GRIDCo to review its maintenance practices and operational procedures as part of the response.

The organisation said Ghana must also pay greater attention to the resilience and redundancy of critical parts of the national grid.

According to ASEC, GRIDCo should demonstrate what alternative transmission routes are available on critical corridors and whether those alternatives can prevent a single fault from developing into a widespread power disturbance.

ASEC is further calling for a clearly defined recovery and rollback plan that can be activated whenever a similar incident occurs.

It said such a plan should spell out restoration procedures, operational decision-making points, responsibilities and communication arrangements.

The aim, it said, should be to ensure that power is restored safely and efficiently while limiting the impact of future disruptions.

ASEC said recent incidents demonstrated the need for Ghana to move away from a largely reactive approach to power system management.

“Recent incidents demonstrate why Ghana's power system must increasingly move from a reactive maintenance and restoration culture to predictive, preventive and resilience-based grid management,” the organisation said.

It warned that repeated system disturbances could undermine public confidence in the power sector while disrupting businesses and imposing high costs on households and industry.

ASEC recommended that GRIDCo strengthen the use of real-time monitoring and advanced data analysis to identify vulnerabilities in the transmission system before they result in major outages.

It also called for greater use of predictive maintenance, automated fault detection and system-wide contingency analysis.

The organisation said the national grid should not be judged only by how quickly power can be restored after a failure, but also by its ability to anticipate, contain and prevent faults from spreading across the network.

While acknowledging the complexity of operating Ghana's interconnected transmission system, ASEC commended the engineers and technical personnel working to restore electricity during outages.

It, however, argued that technical challenges should not prevent the public from receiving information about major disruptions.

“Technical complexity should not become a barrier to accountability and learning,” ASEC said.

“The public deserves to know what happened, why it happened, what failed, what worked, and what is being done to ensure that it does not happen again.”

ASEC is therefore urging GRIDCo to make the findings of its technical investigation public and provide a clear timeline for implementing the corrective measures identified.

“Ghana does not only need power restored after an outage. We need a grid that is resilient enough to prevent a disturbance from becoming a crisis in the first place,” ASEC said.