Ghana’s power shutdown threat by producers called off after new deal
Ghana’s independent power producers (IPPs) on Friday called of an earlier threat to shutdown on Saturday.
The producers were asking for the payment of a $1.58 billion debt owed them by the government.
In late May, the IPPs rejected a government proposal to restructure the said debt as part of Ghana’s decision to seal a $3 billion loan deal from the International Monetary Fund.
Ghana’s former president, John Mahama on Friday joined calls for the power producers not to go ahead with their threat of shutdown with a post on Facebook.
The power producers decided to shutdown but called it off after reaching an interim deal with the state-run Electricity Company of Ghana to settle the arrears.
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“As part of the understanding reached, all the IPPs have received an offer of payments from ECG to enable them operate in the interim thereby providing the Government of Ghana (GOG) and ECG the needed grace period to address the outstanding arrears in the energy sector and to meet their contractual obligations”, the IPPs said in a statement issued on Friday.
The group warned that there would be outages from this month if its members did not receive the said interim payment of 30% of the arrears in time.
The government and Electricity Company of Ghana now have some more time to settle the debt issue to avert major power outages.
“The IPPs will be left with no other choice than to revert to their earlier decision to shut down without any further notice,” it said should the interim deal isn’t executed.
The IPPs which control about 50 percent of Ghana’s energy generation mix.
Source: Africafeeds.com
