Customers of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) whose property and equipment get damaged through power outages cannot sue ECG in court, "Even if they do, they can never win," Mr. Jude Adu-Amankwah, Managing Director of ECG, has said. Answering a question at a press conference Monday, jointly held by the ECG, the Volta River Authority and GRIDCO (a company responsible for the minuteness of transmission lines) to explain the April 20 power outage that plunged the whole country into darkness, Mr. Adu-Amankwah said if a careless driver, for example, crashed into an electric pole resulting in a power outage, how could customers sue ECG for that?" He said natural disasters like earthquakes, floods and lightening could also cause power outages, so a customer who sued ECG did not stand the chance of winning that suit. He said the ECG had not signed any contract with customers that there would never be a problem with the power it supplied to them. On power supply, he disclosed that the ECG would have to double its capacity every 10 years to ensure adequate and reliable power supply to customers. Mr. Adu-Amankwah mentioned obsolete equipment, weak transmission system and the lack of spinning reserve in the generation system as the causes of the April 20 power outage. Besides those weaknesses, he said, GRlDCO had installed automatic frequency load shedding (AFLS) devices in the system which automatically interrupts supply to sections of ECG's customers whenever there is a decay in frequency in the system. “The situation in all these areas can be attributed to the operation of the AFLS, the overloaded and weak distribution networks," he said. Joseph Wiafe, Managing Director of GRlDCO, for his part, said his company's role was to develop and maintain the National Interconnected Transmission System (NITS) and provide non discriminatory open access to all power producers and bulk consumers. He said the national power grid comprised about 4,500 kilometres of high voltage transmission lines with 43 substations that served as plant substations or transformers. Mr. Wiafe said the power network was faced with over aged and obsolete equipment that were installed in 1965. He said overloaded facilities were due to the inability to increase capacity to match demand. Maintenance work is also hampered by lack of spare parts. Mr Wiafe said to prevent total system collapse, AFLS devices were installed to rectify the fault and then restore those loads back as quickly as possible, and noted that the April 20 incident resulted in a total system collapse. "There was an explosion of a substation device. The debris hit a lightening arrester which also exploded, rendering two supply lines from Tema to Accra out of service", he explained. The Chief Executive of VRA, Owura Sarfo, said the projected power demand for 2009 was 1,309 mega watts, while available generation was 1, 482 mega watts. He said the reserve margin of 227 mega watts was equivalent to two gas turbines of 110 mega watts. Owura Sarfo said the VRA had taken the appropriate steps to .reduce the incidence of such faults to the barest minimum. "Fortunately, we have the men and the staff to keep the system in good state", he said. He said the commissioning of the 200 mega watt Sunon Asogli plant next month, would help address the nation's future power demands. Source: Times