The desire to reduce power losses and power theft, has compelled the Tema division of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), to intensify its house-to-house monitoring, and also to initiate moves to change all underground cables to overhead ones.
These measures, according to ECG officials, are to ensure the company gives its customers reliable service.
[contextly_sidebar id=”ISE7vkSDudPRNwC0bNZB4S9LtMaU3UIV”]These developments were made known to Citi News’ Elvis Washington on the sidelines of a media interaction, where the Tema Regional Engineer of the ECG, Mark Asomaning Wiafe, noted that, his outfit was upgrading equipment in most parts of the Tema metropolis.
“What we are doing is that, some of our conductors, we are upgrading them. Presently; we have upgraded that of the whole of Tema Metropolis. They were all underground cables; and we have converted them to 400 amperes capacity. First, it used to be 120 and 265, but now we have upgraded all of them to 400,” Mr. Wiafe revealed.
The Tema Regional Revenue Officer, Emmanuel Seidu, also indicated that, from January to September 2016, the Tema office of the ECG raised GHc 2.8 million from illegal connections, and will intensify its efforts at curbing the illegal connections in the metropolis.
He said, “we are going to intensify this house-to-house because we are changing most of the credit meters info prepaid meters so we are deploying all our disconnetors to do monitoring so we are going to do effective monitoring of all our meters to unearth whatever illegal activities that are going on.”
“We believe that when we are able to change all the credit meters to prepaid meters; and do effective monitoring, we would reduce significantly, if not eradicate the losses.”
Mr. Seidu also said his outfit was deploying smart meters; and this coupled with maximum monitoring “would actually eradicate all these losses that we have due to power theft.”
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By: Delali Adogla-Bessa/citifmonline.com/Ghana