Energy Challenges Are Not Over � Prez Mahama Reveals

President John Dramani Mahama in a meeting with members of the Council of State has disclosed that the energy crises facing the nation are not over yet.

This according to him is because most of our generating assets are gas- based; therefore they do not generate to meet our capacity needed when we don’t get enough gas to feed them.

It would be recalled that President John Dramani Mahama during his delivery on the ‘state of the nations address’ some months ago stated that the energy crises usually popularly known as ‘DUMSOR’ was over.

It was due to the same power crisis that led to the removal of the then Power Minister, Dr Kwabena Donkor who tendered in his resignation to the Presidency on Thursday December 31, 2015.

Dr Donkor had earlier stated he would resign by end of 2015 if he was unable to solve the load shedding problem by the end of the year.

But at his maiden meeting of the year with members of the Council of State at the Flagstaff House Monday, President Mahama indicated that the country is not out of the woods yet, in her quest for sustainable energy because of lack of gas.

“Our energy challenges are not over but at least for now, we have been able to fix the problem, we are able to match demand and supply, even though we are living dangerously because our redundancy is small, not because we don’t have the generating capacity but because several of our generating assets are gas-based. We are not able to get enough gas to feed them.

“For instance if you take the eastern generating area which is Tema, we have almost 600MW of gas-based generation but are not getting gas through the West African Gas pipeline to be able to run them. One reason is because Nigeria’s demand for gas is increasing and there is regular destruction of the gas infrastructure and so we get a certain volume today, tomorrow it drops so you cannot predict how you are running those assets,” he added.