The Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) says it has received a $17 million loan from the French Development Agency, Agence Française de Développement (AFD), to boost infrastructure works on some major transmission lines between Accra and Tema.

Addressing a press briefing on Sunday, Director of System Operations for GRIDCo, Mark Awuah Baah, indicated that the high demand for power within the Accra-Tema area, has become necessary to undertake the reconstruction exercise.

He stressed that "if we don't reinforce the system here, it becomes difficult to stabilise the system, so there's been a lot of injection that we are doing in Accra-Tema alone."

"Accra and Tema alone consume about 40% of Ghana's power demand, so it is very high. There is a lot of generation in Tema, and these have to be evacuated to Accra."

"If you're driving along the motorway, from Accra to Tema, on the left side, you'd see all these activities on the transmission lines, and these are costing us about $17 million," he disclosed.

Mr Baah revealed that the reconstruction works will be completed by March 2022. This, he highlights, will aid in power stability in the region and surrounding areas.

Other key transmission projects

As part of efforts to improve power supply in the Greater Accra Region, Mr Baah highlighted that the Pokuase Bulk Supply Point has been completed. The project, which cost $47 million, was financed through a MiDA Grant.

The Accra Central Bulk Supply Point, which cost $40 million, has also been completed.

However, works are still ongoing at the Kasoa Bulk Supply Point and are expected to be completed in January 2022. In addition, a transmission line in Kumasi is expected to be fully upgraded by March 2023 with the financial support of $6.97 million from the European Union (EU).

Mark Baah explained that "all these are required to ensure that outages to customers are minimised [because] customers want quality services."

"We want to improve on our transmission line capacities, and we're doing that because we are planning the system in such a way so that should any transmission line go off, as a result of maintenance or there is a fault on it, the customer should not even sense it."