The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) has declared an end to load shedding, with its Managing Director Ing. Julius Kpekpena announcing on Sunday that supply has stabilised following the resolution of disruptions that began with a fire at the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) Akosombo substation last month.
Speaking on TV3’s Hot Issues on May 3, Kpekpena said load shedding was halted before the last two generators were even fully synchronised to the national grid, a development he described as evidence that the country now holds generation capacity beyond what current demand requires.
“We stopped load shedding on Wednesday before the last two generators were synchronised onto the grid. We have sufficient power to distribute. Right now, we have enough power to supply all our customers and our demand is about 4,300 megawatts,” he said.
The fire broke out at GRIDCo’s Akosombo substation switchyard at approximately 2:01 pm on April 23, 2026, knocking out nearly 1,000 megawatts from the national grid against a peak national demand of around 4,400 megawatts, forcing ECG into a rotating six-hour load shedding arrangement affecting communities across Greater Accra, Volta, Ashanti and Central Regions. By April 29, GRIDCo had restored four of the affected units, returning 550 megawatts to the grid.
Kpekpena acknowledged that the Akosombo incident was not the only challenge the sector faced in recent months. Distribution-level faults had already been causing intermittent outages in pockets of the country in the weeks before the fire, and a separate gas supply disruption in April also triggered brief load shedding. He said both issues have since been resolved.
Despite the positive update, the ECG MD conceded that isolated distribution problems continue to affect some communities and pledged active efforts to address them. Energy analysts have separately warned that without redundancy built into the distribution network, infrastructure upgrade works currently underway could continue to trigger localised outages for up to 24 months.
