Following the recent power outages and challenges facing the power utilities, the Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) has organised a conference for its technical staff as well as those from Volta River Authority (VRA), Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), and Northern Electricity Distribution Company (NEDCO) to deliberate on how best to address the challenges.
Designated as the annual protection and control conference, the two-day event brought together over one hundred engineers and technical staff in a frank and open discussion aimed at improving the reliability of power delivery.
Speaking at the opening, Mr. Charles Darku, CEO of GRIDCo, described as unfortunate the failures witnessed in the power system of Ghana in recent months.
He reminded participants that demand for power this year is at its highest ever, topping 1,750 MW and thus putting the overall system under great stress.
The two-day conference was dubbed “Protection and Control: Key to Reliable System Performance”. Mr. Darku challenged participants to rise to the challenge of modernising and expanding the grid into a first-class asset that they can all be proud of.
The main aim of the conference was to among other things conduct a comprehensive review of existing protection and control protocols, discuss modern trends emerging in the industry, and how best to take advantage of them to modernise Ghana?s network for the reliable supply of power to all Ghanaians in accordance with international best practice.
Mr. Darku said GRIDCo had invited the participation of its colleagues from the other utilities because the business value chain requires the participation of all in order to be successful.
?He said with the support of VRA, ECG and NEDCO, the state of the grid has been improved in the past three years.
Several new transformers have been installed across the system to increase transformer capacity; the transmission line constraint into Accra has been removed with the construction of the fourth Volta-Achimota circuit; and new substations are under construction after others were completed and handed over to commercial operations.
?He praised the participants for the work done and asked them to work even harder to improve their services.
On the protection and control side, a lot of the over-age electromechanical relays, mostly installed in the 60s, have now been replaced with modern state of the art numeric relays which are much more reliable. Analogue energy billing meters have also been replaced with digital ones.
Most importantly, personnel are upgrading their skills to meet the demands of the times. Training programmers for protection and control staff are ongoing.
GRIDCo’s Review Consultant, Professor Emeritus Francesco Iliceto of Rome University, gave a presentation on the GE C90 Special Protection Relays to be deployed on the interconnection with both the Ivorian and Togolese systems to separate those networks from Ghana’s in the event of severe disturbance within those networks.
He mentioned that these special protection relays are the latest technologies being applied in Europe to separate national networks in the event of such contingencies.
In an interview on the sidelines of the conference, Mr. Darku expressed his eagerness to ensure that whatever is necessary is done to improve the situation.
Despite its age, Ghana?s grid (built almost fifty years ago), remains one of the best in Africa. He admitted that he could not promise that the system will not go down again because nowhere in the world is there a “collapse free” system. “What is important is the frequency of such occurrences,” he added.
Protection and control engineers and technicians are critical in ensuring that faults do not affect the entire system through speedy intervention.
