Eighty-Seven Megawatts of power added to national grid

President John Dramani Mahama had reassured Ghanaians of the government�s commitment to ending the current erratic power supply with an additional 87 megawatts of power from the Takoradi Thermal Plant. The 87MW is part of the expected 132MW from the Thermal 3 Combined Cycle known as T3, which started in 2010. The full capacity will be completed by the end of April this year. An official statement issued by the Ministry of Information and Media Relations said the President gave the assurance when he paid a day's working visit to some power and water installations in the Western Region on Monday. �I am impressed with the quality and the rate of work. As I said during the State of the Nation Address, we have not been sleeping, we have been trying to bring as much generation as possible into the system and T3 is one example of it,� it said. The President said �We started in 2010 and it is largely complete. It�s just two per cent of work left to have it fully operational� he stated. President Mahama said he was optimistic that the timelines given in his State of the Nation address would be met. The President also visited the intake point of the West African Gas Pipeline, which suffered a major destruction in August last year, affecting availability of gas to power the thermal plants. He apologized once again to Ghanaians and businesses for the current power problems, explaining that the major shortfall in generation capacity was because of the breakdown of the gas pipeline. The General Manager in-charge of Operations at the West Africa Gas Pipeline, Mr Dele Adongbede, told President Mahama that work on the pipeline was almost complete. He said though the problem had been fixed engineers are cleaning the pipelines of debris, liquid and sand. Accompanying the President were the Chief of Staff, Prosper Bani, Minister of Energy and Petroleum, Mr Emmanuel Kofi Armah Buah and the Western Regional Minister, Mr Paul Evans Aidoo.