Football enthusiasts in the country are being promised that their following of the 2010 World Cup would not be interrupted by power outages. The main distributer of power, Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) at a press conference assured the public that there would be enough power for the next four weeks. But Smart Yeboah, Head of Customer Service of ECG, says the nation would experience minimum power disruption, if not the usual erratic power cuts, which is commonly referred to as dum so, dum so (on-off-on-off). He said non-critical maintenance projects have been suspended. “During the World Cup and as well as after the World Cup we will be pursuing most of these projects with a lot more vigour. Some of them involve the fact that we may have to put you off, so after the World Cup there may be a little more increase in the number of outages, and these would be linked to the improvement exercises. But at the end of it we will be seeing incremental improvement in quality as well as reliability.” The press conference was organized jointly by the three companies involved in electricity production, transmission and distribution - Volta Region Authority, Ghana Grid Company and the Electricity Company of Ghana - in Accra Thursday to respond to public criticisms on the recent increases in tariffs. The three companies had a total increase of 89%. Joy FM’s Sammy Darko who sat through the conference said the ECG intends to beef up its staff strength to get a 24-hour stand-by workers to attend to any emergency. There would also be a temporary hold-up of non critical maintenances. The companies took into consideration public criticisms concerning tariff increments, noting that if the Public Utility Regulatory Commission had considered intermittent increases when necessary, there would not be need for this hike in utility tariffs. They promised to pursue vigorous improvement in their services within the next 18 months. Mr Kweku Andoh Awotwi, Chief Executive of VRA, said the company for years has not had sufficient revenue from tariff to cover the cost of just procuring crude oil for its production. “I am pleased to say that with this new tariff and also an expectation that we will be getting more gas from Nigeria over the next couple of months, we will no longer be going to the Ministry of Finance every month to ask for help to pay for our crude oil.” Charles Darko, CEO of GRIDCo said the total money needed to invest into their operations to ensure efficient service delivery is $500m, but the new tariff would accrue about $281m, which will go a long way to improve their services. He said an additional transformer would be added to the expanded sub-station at Mallam, hopefully by early next year, “so that there will be some relief within the system”. The company is also working on the fourth circuit between Tema and Accra which would be ready before the year ends, “to remove the risk on supply and reliability into the city”. Story by Isaac Essel/Myjoyonline.com/Ghana