For many who have lived in many advanced economies, the stability of the power supply makes them question whether their power authorities undertake any maintenance work.
This is because in Ghana, every maintenance work on our power infrastructure means that power must go off.
However, it is a no-brainer that the advanced countries perform maintenance. It is seen as a sign of strength and a system being cared for, upgraded, and future-proofed.
In Ghana, it has increasingly become a trigger for darkness. The return of dumsor, following the Akosombo substation fire, and other reasons such as maintenance works, transformer changes, have once again exposed a deeper, more uncomfortable truth that Ghana does not just have a power problem, it has a planning problem.
For many experts, maintenance is not an emergency. It is predictable. It is scheduled. It is, by definition, something a system prepares for. Yet, each time critical infrastructure undergoes routine work in Ghana, the result is the same; widespread outages, economic disruption, and public frustration.
Why does a country that knows when maintenance will occur still fail to keep the lights on?
In more advanced systems, maintenance periods are buffered by contingency plans. Alternative fuel sources are secured ahead of time. Reserve capacity is activated. Power is rerouted. In some cases, excess supply is deliberately maintained, not for profit, but for resilience. The goal is to ensure that the consumer barely notices that maintenance is happening.
Ghana’s approach appears to be the opposite. The ongoing maintenance at the Atuabo Gas Processing Plant, for instance, has significantly reduced gas supply to thermal plants. The consequences have been immediate. Independent Power Producers (IPPs), heavily dependent on gas, have scaled down or shut operations entirely. Asogli is running only partially. Others, like CENIT and Karpower, are offline.
This is not because Ghana lacks installed capacity. It is because it lacks a system that anticipates disruptions and prepares for them.
A well-planned energy system does not wait for a shortfall before reacting. It builds redundancy. It diversifies fuel sources. It ensures that when one component is offline, another seamlessly takes its place. Ghana’s current predicament suggests that such buffers are either insufficient or poorly coordinated.
The cost of this situation is not just on paper. For businesses, it translates into higher operating expenses, as diesel generators replace grid power. For small enterprises, it means lost revenue and, in some cases, closure.
For households, it disrupts daily life, from cooking to studying to preserving food. And for the broader economy, it sends a troubling signal to investors: reliability is still not guaranteed.
What makes the situation more troubling is that these outcomes are not the result of unforeseeable shocks. Maintenance at Atuabo was not a surprise. The dependence of IPPs on gas is not new. The vulnerabilities in the system are well known.
Yet, the response remains reactive rather than proactive. This is where the real cost of poor planning becomes evident. It is not just about power outages; it is about a cycle of avoidable disruption that undermines productivity, weakens confidence, and slows development.
For now, the lights are not going off in places across the country because maintenance is happening. They are going off because maintenance is happening without a plan robust enough to absorb it.
Until that changes, dumsor will remain less of a technical failure and more of a planning one; a recurring reminder that in Ghana, even the predictable still catches the system unprepared.
