The Africa Sustainable Energy Centre (ASEC) is calling on the Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) to provide the public with a comprehensive technical report on the recent widespread power outages and system disturbances affecting electricity supply across parts of Ghana.

GRIDCo has indicated that the latest disturbance was associated with a fault on the Akosombo Volta transmission line, which triggered the automatic tripping of generating units and other power system protection mechanisms. GRIDCo has also stated that a technical investigation was underway.

While ASEC recognises the importance of GRIDCo’s immediate restoration efforts and the role of automatic protection systems in safeguarding the national grid, restoration of power should not be the end of the response. Ghana needs to understand precisely why these incidents occur, whether existing protection and redundancy measures are adequate, and what must be done to prevent recurrence.

ASEC CALLS FOR A COMPREHENSIVE INCIDENT REPORT

ASEC therefore calls on GRIDCo, in collaboration with the relevant power sector stakeholders, to publish a detailed post-incident technical report covering at least the following areas:

1. Root Cause Analysis:

The report must clearly establish the immediate, underlying and systemic causes of the disturbance. It should distinguish between the initiating fault, subsequent equipment trips, cascading events and any weaknesses that may have amplified the impact.

2. Protection System Performance:

GRIDCo should provide an assessment of how the protection systems responded during the incident, including whether protection operated as designed, whether there were any delayed or unexpected trips, and whether coordination between protection systems was adequate.

The report should document the technical and operational lessons from the incident and identify what could have been done differently to limit the scale and duration of the outage.

4. Preventive Measures:

GRIDCo must identify specific corrective and preventive measures, including upgrades to transmission infrastructure, protection systems, monitoring and control systems, maintenance practices and operational procedures.

5. Grid Resilience and Redundancy:

ASEC believes Ghana must move beyond simply restoring the system after failures. GRIDCo should demonstrate what redundancy exists on critical transmission corridors and whether alternative supply paths are capable of preventing a single fault from developing into a widespread disturbance.

6. Recovery and Rollback Plan:

GRIDCo should establish and communicate a robust recovery and rollback plan that can be activated if a similar incident occurs. Such a plan should define clear restoration procedures, operational decision points, responsibilities and communication protocols to ensure that electricity supply can be restored safely and efficiently.

PREVENTION MUST BECOME THE PRIORITY

Recent incidents demonstrate why Ghana’s power system must increasingly move from a reactive maintenance and restoration culture to predictive, preventive and resilience-based grid management.

ASEC is particularly concerned that repeated system disturbances can undermine public confidence, disrupt businesses and impose significant economic costs on households and industry.

The national grid is critical infrastructure. Its resilience must therefore be assessed not only by how quickly electricity can be restored after an incident, but also by the system’s ability to anticipate, contain and prevent failures from cascading across the network.

ASEC further recommends that GRIDCo strengthen the use of real-time monitoring, advanced analytics, predictive maintenance, automated fault detection and system-wide contingency analysis to identify vulnerabilities before they result in major disruptions.

TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY

ASEC acknowledges the complexity of operating Ghana’s interconnected transmission system and commends the engineers and technical personnel who work under difficult circumstances to restore supply.

However, technical complexity should not become a barrier to accountability and learning.

The public deserves to know what happened, why it happened, what failed, what worked, and what is being done to ensure that it does not happen again.

ASEC therefore calls on GRIDCo to make the findings of its technical investigation available to the public and to provide a clear implementation timeline for all corrective actions arising from the investigation.

“Ghana does not only need power restored after an outage. We need a grid that is resilient enough to prevent a disturbance from becoming a crisis in the first place”.