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Minister of Power, Dr. Kwabena Donkor has debunked the assertion that the government is unable to buy crude oil to power generators hence the difficulty in resolving the erratic power supply.

According to him, it is not factual the position of many Ghanaians that crude is the solution to the energy crisis, revealing that the country is facing capacity challenge as no amount of crude oil will turn into energy if the plants are down or are not there.

Speaking on Oman FM’s Morning Show, Dr. Kwabena Donkor admitted that the energy sector has occasionally had challenges with fuel but added that not all the other plants use crude oil because the old and new plants uses gas and diesel.

He however cited that the Asogli plant is one-fuel plant but it does not use crude oil, making it impossible to use crude oil when there is no or inadequate gas coming from Nigeria.

He further explained that majority of the plants are dual-fuel and therefore a number of them use light crude but not all the plants use light crude; insisting that no plant is down because of light crude as every plant that is down is down for reasons other than fuel.

“Plants are down for plant maintenance and others are down for unplanned mechanical reasons. The basic issue is that we don’t have enough generation; in power systems management, you need what we call redundancy so that once a plant goes down whether for plan maintenance or unplanned, you bring in the reserved plan but we find ourselves in a case where we don’t even have enough...so, going forward, you need to build redundancy so that we have an adequate reserve margin,” he explained.