Richmond Rockson: power to stabilise by week’s end

Ghanaians rattled by erratic electricity supply following a fire at a critical GRIDCo installation in Akosombo have been given a timeline, the Energy Ministry says power should stabilise by the end of the week, as engineers work against the clock on a temporary fix to keep the lights on while the real damage is assessed.

The fire, which tore through a substation operated by the Ghana Grid Company in Akosombo, did not just disrupt supply, it gutted the facility’s main control room, leaving engineers with a recovery challenge that stretches well beyond a quick repair job.

Richmond Rockson, Director of Communications at the Ministry of Energy and Green Transition, laid out the scale of the problem Monday during an appearance on Citi FM. “The whole control room has to be rebuilt, and that will take several months,” he said. The rebuilding process, he made clear, is a long-term undertaking, but the immediate crisis will not wait for it.

The short-term answer, according to Rockson, is a bypass. Engineers have begun putting in place a system that routes around the destroyed control room entirely, designed to return supply to something approaching normality without waiting for full reconstruction. “The engineers have assured us that within the week, or at the latest by the close of the week, supply should return to normal,” he stated.

In the meantime, the Akosombo Dam has not gone completely dark. Rockson disclosed that one of the facility’s six turbines is currently running, providing some generation capacity to support stabilisation efforts while the broader recovery continues.

The outages have stirred anxiety across households and businesses, with the disruption drawing uncomfortable comparisons to Ghana’s prolonged power crisis years, a period many Ghanaians have no desire to revisit. The Ministry’s assurance, while measured, is aimed squarely at containing that anxiety before it deepens.