Dr Ishmael Ackah
The Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) has imposed a regulatory charge of 3,000 penalty units on Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) amounting to GH¢5,868,000 for 163 breaches in contravention of Regulation 39 of L.I. 2413.
According to the Commission, this amount will be borne by the board members of ECG who were in office from January 1, 2024 to March 18, 2024.
The Commission in a letter said the board members shall pay the regulatory charge into a dedicated account under the joint control of the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Finance on or before May 30, 2024.
“The Commission has determined that having regard to the nature of ECG’s ownership and business, the imposition of the penalty of GH¢5,868,000 on ECG would be counter-productive, as payment from ECG’s revenue would have a rebounding adverse effect on quality of service and consumers who pay tariffs to the company,” the letter explained.
“For that reason, in the interest of justice and to protect the interests of consumers, the Commission shall hold the Board Members of ECG who were in office from January 1 to March 18, 2024 liable for the payment of GH¢5,868,000.00),” it stressed.
According to the letter, board members were at all material times responsible for providing strategic direction in order to ensure that consumers receive safe, adequate, efficient, reasonable, and non-discriminatory service.
The PURC again fined ECG GH¢36,000 for not submitting all bank and investment accounts to the Commission.
The PURC had submitted three requests to the ECG, with deadlines of March 25, March 27, and April 2, 2024.
It stated that the information required relates to tariff revenue allocation under the Cash Waterfall Mechanism (CWM), the provision of regulatory audit data, the submission of operational information, and the provision of additional regulatory audit data.
However, in a letter sent to the ECG on Monday, April 15, 2024, the PURC said that the “details of ECG’s bank accounts submitted were incomplete, contrary to the Order.”
“The Commission hereby imposes an initial regulatory charge of 3,000 penalty units on ECG in accordance with Regulation 45 of LI 2413, amounting to GH¢36,000,” the letter pointed out.
It said the ECG shall pay the initial regulatory charge of GH¢36,000 to the Commission on or before April 22, 2024.
The Commission chastised the ECG for providing “not factually accurate” reasons for the erratic and random power outages that consumers have recently experienced.
The ECG said that power supply trips to homes and workplaces were caused by overloaded transformers (up to 630). It also blamed the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) for making unplanned and last-minute demand to cut supply, as well as for failing to publish a load management timetable to inform consumers when not to expect supply.
However, in its report on the outages ascribed by ECG to the purported 630 overloaded transformers at peak hours, the PURC stated that its analysis of the data given by ECG did not support the claim.
“Analysis of the data submitted showed that out of 715 transformer details submitted, 31 were loaded less than 70%, 595 were loaded between 70-100% and 89 were loaded above 100%,” said the PURC.
“The data submitted by ECG was further compared to the total outage data provided by ECG for the period of January 1 to March 18, 2024.
“The Commission established that 647 outage incidents occurred between 7 pm and 11 pm. Of these 647 outage incidents, only 3 were planned outages relating to transformers.
“The analyses showed that the majority of the outages between 7 pm to 11 pm were as a result of load management operations by GRIDCo and faults unrelated to overloaded transformers,” the report also said.
“ECG’s attribution of the outages between 7 pm and 11 pm to transformer overload was therefore not factually accurate,” said PURC, which stated that the causes of these outages are already being investigated.
By Ernest Kofi Adu