The Electricity Company of Ghana, ECG would need not less than 700 million dollars to deal with the ongoing load-shedding and frequent power-cuts. The ECG has announced the many more areas are to be affected by the ongoing load-shedding exercise after a planned review of the exercise today. ECG says the investment is needed to upgrade its systems to the highest operational standard for a more effective power supply in the country. Director of Operations, Tetteh Okine spoke with JOY BUSINESS making particular reference to what he says are investment estimates established a couple of years ago by the company. “When we did an estimate about three years ago, we needed some 1.2 billion dollars and so far we’ve had around 500 million dollars. The figure must have even increased because on year to year basis Ghana’s consumption is rising between 10 and 13 percent a year and that’s very high in the industry”. He added that for guaranteed effective power-supply in the country, it is critical investments are also made in the operations of other key-stakeholders such as the VRA. “Within all the different tiers of the power supply there are different problems at different stages. Its a mixture of all of them because we have our problems and so do our sister companies also have their problems. So as for the investments, all the three utilities need huge investments. If we had all that investments and plans in place we wouldn’t be going through this problem” he concluded.