YOU CAN'T SUE ECG - MD DECLARES

By Francis Xah

Tuesday, 28 April 2009 http://www.newtimesonline.com

Customers of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) whose property and equipment get damaged through power outages cannot sue ECG in court. “Even if they do, they can never win”, Mr. Jude Adu-Amankwah Managing Director of ECG, has said. Answering a question at a press conference yesterday, jointly held by the ECG, the Volta River Authority and GRIDCO, a company responsible for the minuteness of transmission lines to explain the April 20 power outage that plunged the whole country into darkness, Mr. Adu-Amankwah said if a careless driver, for example, crashed into an electric pole resulting in a power outage, how could customers sue ECG for that. He said natural disasters like earthquakes, floods and lightening could also cause power outages, so a customer who sued ECG did not stand the chance of winning that suit. He said the ECG had not signed any contract with customers that, there would never be a problem with the power it supplied to them. On power supply, he disclosed that the ECG would have to double its capacity every 10 years to ensure adequate and reliable power supply to customers. Mr. Adu-Amankwah mentioned obsolete equipment, weak transmission system and the lack of spinning reserve in the generation system, was the causes of the April 20 power outage. Besides those weaknesses, he said, GRIDCO had installed automatic frequency load shedding (AFLS) devices in the system which automatically interrupts supply to sections of ECG’s customers whenever there was a decay in frequency in the system. “The situation in all these areas can be attributed to the operation of the AFLS, the overloaded and weak distribution networks,” he said. Joseph Wiafe, Managing Director of GRIDCO, for his part, said his company’s role was to develop and maintain the National Interconnected Transmission System (NITS) and provide non discriminatory open access to all power producers and bulk consumers. He said the national power grid comprise about 4,500kilometres of high voltage transmission lines with 43 substations that served as plant substations or transformer. Mr. Wiafe said the power network was faced with over aged and obsolete equipment that were installed in 1965. He said overloaded facilities were due to the inability to increase capacity to match demand and added that maintenance work was also hampered by lack of spare parts. Mr Wiafe said to prevent total system collapse, AFLS devices were installed to rectify the fault and then restore those loads back as quickly as possible, and noted that the April 20 incident resulted in a total system collapse. “There was an explosion of a substation device, the debris hit a lightening arrester which also exploded, rendering two supply lines from Tema to Accra out of service”, he explained. The Chief Executive of VRA, Owura Sarfo, said the projected power demand for 2009 was 1,309 mega watts, while available generation was 1,482 mega watts. He said the reserve margin of 227 mega watts was equivalent to two gas turbines of 110 mega watts. Owura Sarfo gave an assurance that VRA has taken the appropriate steps to reduce the incident of such faults to the barest minimum. “Fortunately, we have the men and the staff to keep the system in good state”, he said.   He said the commissioning of the 200 mega watt Sunon Asogli plant next month, would help address the nation’s future power demands. On the statement by the Managing director that customers who go ahead and take the ECG to court can never win the case against the ECG, Mr Ace Ankumah a legal Practitioner said the Managing Director’s statement admits that customers can sue, but the Managing Director is confident of victory. That contradicts his earlier position that the customers cannot sue. He recalled that even when the ECG was a statutory corporation, the High Court held (in the case of Hasnem v. ECG /1992/2 GLR 250) that N.L.C.D. 125 imposed a duty on the ECG to supply electricity to customers who had such contracts with them, and were therefore required to take such steps as were reasonable to ensure safe supply of electricity. “According to the court, the breach of the duty would give the customer a cause of action and might also afford evidence of negligence. ECG was held to owe a duty to their customers to ensure that their cables were capable of serving and actually serving all the places for which it was intended to serve.” Mr. Ankumah said even though the plaintiffs ultimately lost the case, it was because they could not prove that the relevant cable was inadequate to service the area in question. “The principle was, therefore, established that if there is evidence of negligence, the ECG would be liable to the judicial process.” “Of course, there would be no liability if the cause of the damage to customers’ property was a third party or an Act of God (eg floods and earthquakes) over which the ECG has no control.  However, that does not amount to immunity from legal action, and certainly does not constitute a basis for arguing that the ECG was somehow guaranteed legal success in every legal action. “Definitely, if there is proof of negligence, ECG will be held liable.  Indeed, if it can be proved that ECG had used inferior material to build or construct its pylons and /or poles when it knew that the area was prone to earthquakes and floods, ECG will have liability”, Mr. Ankumah said