The Public Utilities Regulatory Commission has slammed the Electricity Company of Ghana for offering “not factually accurate” reasons for the erratic and haphazard power outages suffered by consumers in recent times.

The ECG had claimed that overloaded transformers (as many as 630) were responsible for the power supply trips to homes and workplaces. It also blamed the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo), of making unplanned and eleventh-hour demand to cut supply, the reason also it could not provide a load management timetable to guide consumers on when not to expect supply.

But in its report on the outages attributed by ECG to the alleged 630 overloaded transformers during peak hours, the PURC said its analysis of the data submitted by ECG did not prove to be the case.

“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 January 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.

“ECG’s attribution of the outages between 7 pm and 11 pm to transformer overload was therefore not factually accurate,” maintained the PURC, which said it is already investigating the causes of these outages.