PURC to penalise ECG

The Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) has decided to penalise the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) for its failure to replace faulty meters for many of its costumers nationwide.

The failure on the part of the ECG has seen several consumers paying above the 59.2 per cent increment which took effect in December 2015.

The situation has seen some angry consumers besieging selected offices of the ECG in parts of the country.

The Director of Public Relations and External Affairs at the PURC, Nana Yaa Jantuah, told the Daily Graphic in Accra yesterday that the commission was working on the penalty unit to be imposed on the ECG.

Post-tariff monitoring

Ms Jantuah said following the major increment in 2015, a post-tariff monitoring programme instituted by the PURC revealed that the ECG had failed to address the challenges which had characterised its operations for some time now.

The monitoring programme, she said, was aimed at ascertaining the veracity of complaints the PURC had received from consumers concerning the implementation of the 2015 tariffs.

“The exercises revealed that there was rampant failure of some prepaid-payment meters and the ECG had not attached any urgency to the matter of replacement to ease pressure on consumers.

“We identified some level of laxity towards the issue of replacement,” she said.

Penalty

The imposition of the penalty, she said, was being done in line with rules 13 and 14 of the Electricity Supply and Distribution (Standards of Performance) Regulations 2008 (LI 1935) which the ECG had breached.

“The commission is, therefore, exercising its oversight responsibility to ensure that the ECG lives up to expectation,” Ms Jantuah said.

She reminded consumers that Rule 4 of the Electricity Supply and Distribution (Standards of Performance) 2008, (LI 1935) required a supplier of electricity to ensure that the cumulative electricity interruption for each customer within the operational year did not exceed the following 48 hours in a metropolitan, municipal or industrial area, 72 hours in a district capital or 144 hours in a rural area.

Those situations, she said, however, did not include scheduled outages of a special nature.

No increment

Last week, the PURC announced that there would be no increment in existing water and electricity tariffs for the first quarter of 2016 by way of using the automatic adjustment formula (AAF).

Using the AAF, the commission arrived at the decision following a tracking of the key determinants of tariff increases which showed that the combination of the variation was low.

“There is no significant difference between the net effect of the indicators announced for the major increases in 2015, following some level of stability in the various indicators, some of which are low and others high,” it said.

As such, tariffs have been maintained at 59.5 per cent for electricity and 67.2 per cent for water for domestic consumers which has been in effect since December 14, 2015.

Source: Graphic