Aboadze Adds 300 MW To National Grid

More than 300 megawatts (MW) of power has been added to the national grid from the Aboadze Power Enclave. This follows the completion of repair works in the Aboadze Power Enclave comprising the TAPCo and TICO plants. An additional 100 MW of power is also expected to be added to the national grid by the close of this week from the Takoradi International Company (TICO). The Maintenance Manager of the Volta River Authority (VRA), Ing. Stephen Asamoah Owusu, who briefed the Energy and Petroleum Minister, Mr Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah, said the engineers had resolved the outages on T1�s gas turbine One and Two. Mr Buah was visiting the plant to check on the status of the repair works. Load shedding to be minimised �I can say that by our plan, we are bringing the steam-turbine by today (Tuesday) and in total, we are adding 330MW from T1 which has been down since January 2014. �I can say that if T2 and other units continue running, we expect to have more than 400MW from the Aboadze power enclave,� Ing. Owusu said adding 400MW to the national grid from Aboadze would mean the load shedding would minimise. Ing. Owusu indicated that the system control centres, the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) and the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo), had been shedding loads of between 300MW and 500MW, �therefore adding 400MW from this enclave will improve the situation significantly.� Challenges He attributed the problem at the Aboadze power enclave to the frequent breakdown of the system. �On generating Unit One, in particular, we have a failure on the compressor which took us more than nine months to complete�, he said. The plants at Aboadze enclave worked perfectly, until some challenges were detected during the planned maintenance that led to the shutdown. For TICO, its Vice-President in charge of Operations, Mr Daniel Dexter, said the engineers were doing a major overhaul to make sure the plants were reliable for the next 15 years. For his part the Minister of Energy and Petroleum, Mr Emmanuel Armah- Kofi Buah said the government was not happy with the current power situation and was working seriously to ensure reliable power to industry and commerce.