The arrival of the 225-megawatt power barge procured by the government from Turkey to augment the country’s electricity shortfall might further delay as the Minister of Power, Kwabena Donkor has indicated that it is still undergoing custom clearance at the ports in that country.
The barge was initially expected to arrive in Ghanaian waters in three weeks but the Minister clarified that the three week arrival schedule will begin after the barge has been cleared by the Turkish customs.
“We are nowhere within getting to the end of the three weeks so I again stand by the around three weeks, this is what we said and we are still on schedule. It is a process and we made sure that we said it was going to go into quarantine for customs for other checks to be done and all that within the three week period so it is not when it sets sail. It at least sets sail from dock yard to customs for quarantine and when all that is complete and any other paper work that needs to be completed is done, within the three weeks window we expect that it will be in Ghanaian waters.”
The Minister’s revelation comes on the back of a recent report that Ghanaian authorities were as on Monday, November 2, 2015, seeking partnership for the provision of fuel to prevent the barge for the journey to Ghana.
The government, in order to resolve the power crisis, which has bedeviled the nation, contracted Karpower for the supply of two emergency power plants with the capacity of producing 225 megawatts each.
The first one was expected to be in the country in April, 2015, but due to unexplained reasons, the arrival date was postponed to September.
Kwabena Donkor also touched on the frequent power outages the nation is experiencing in recent times, describing it as a “planned systemic outage arriving out of generation inadequacy. ”
“That does not mean at the end of load shedding you cannot have outages, operational outages in your specific areas, a transformer can be overloaded and it will give way. You remember his Excellency the President was in US recently and on his visit to LA there was a power outage. Those things can happen but it does not arrive out of planned generation inadequacy.”