The Minister for Energy, Boakye Agyarko, has attributed last Monday’s power blackout to “a weak national grid system.”

According to the Minister, “we have not completed work on the national grid system and so in its weakened state, any disturbance either in or out of Togo or Cote d'Ivoire, can shut down the grid system.”

Speaking to The Finder on the sidelines of the maiden Energy Summit in Accra yesterday, Agyarko explained that there was a disturbance on the 330k transmission line in and out of Cote d'Ivoire and once that disturbance occurred, it affected the transmission system.

The two-day summit themed ‘The Future of Energy in Ghana’ is providing a platform for stimulating discussions that would find expression into policies and strategies of the sector and the investment opportunities therein.

“What happened last night was to isolate the line into Cote d'Ivoire and bring everybody back on,” he said.

Mr Agyarko recalled a similar incident in May which was not detected early enough.

“On the 3rd of May, it was the Asiakpe-Togo line that got disturbed; we didn’t see it early enough but it got isolated and then all the other power generators were brought back on,” he explained.

Elaborating, the Minister said “when the transmission gets affected all the power generators must disengage to protect the assets; engineers then go in to identify the particular line that is affected; they isolate that line and restore power.”

Ghana had failed to invest enough in its transmission systems, bulk supply systems, sub-stations and transformers.

It was more about money than a technical problem, the Minister intimated, pointing out that “because we have not managed the money rightly the technical people have not been able to do what is required of them; that has turned a financial problem into a technical one so the genesis is a financial problem.”