Post-paid consumers of electricity who do not receive their electricity bills for a year have been asked not to pay.
The Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) has explained that the supplier of electricity could not disconnect supply to consumers when they failed to provide them with a bill of payment.
“It is your right as consumers,” Ms Nana Yaa Jantuah, the Director of Public Relations and External Affairs of the PURC, told Public Administration students of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) who visited the commission last Thursday to acquaint themselves with its operations.
According to the PURC, legislative instrument (LI) 1816 of 2005 on electricity supply and distributions clearly states that, “the supplier cannot recover the cost of that service unless the delay in the billing occurred without negligence on the part of the supplier, or due to the customer’s actions.”
Regulatory clubs
Ms Jantuah, who took the students through the tariff setting regulations, monitoring, and other operations of the PURC, also announced the formation of regulatory clubs across tertiary institutions.
The first of such club, which has since been established at the KNUST, with a student as a liaison officer between the commission and the students, will take consumer complaints from across all halls of residence and private hostel facilities for redress.
The students, who took turns to lay before the commission a barrage of complaints about hikes in electricity tariffs which was having dire consequences on their finances, appealed to the PURC to consider a tariff regime that could provide a respite for students on campuses of various tertiary institutions.
Ms Jantuah, however, hinted that the setup of the regulatory clubs would be to investigate students’ complaints on water and electricity.
Such inputs, she said, would be incorporated into the commission’s work plan on tariffs for further discussions with the providers.
Off-Grid Solar Project
Ms Jantuah also hinted that the PURC had from 2014 to date supplied and installed off-grid solar facilities for about 155 artisans in the Kumasi metropolis.
The beneficiaries, who received the facilities at no cost to them, have subsequently been taken off the national grid, so they do not have to spend their incomes on electricity.
Consumption
Ms Jantuah also cautioned the general public to manage power consumption in the midst of availability.
“We are having a respite in the power supply situation with some level of stabilisation of supply, but we need to manage consumption in order not to overload the generation systems.
“It would be difficult to recover should we again be plunged into “dumsor” because, as consumers, we have failed to manage our consumption”, she added.
She gave an assurance that the PURC would continue to conduct monitoring of gadgets of power producers, the kind of crude oil in use for production, among other measures, to ensure the right tools were in use, so that the power challenges would not recur.
She also appeal to the utility providers to endeavour to collect debts owed them by institutions, since finance played a major role in the crisis that bedevilled the country in the past.
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