The Electricity Company of Ghana has organised a day’s training program for its accredited Contractors as part of the drive for safety adherence on all its operational installations. The second session in the series planned for this year was held on Thursday, July 6, 2023, at the ECG Training Centre in Tema.
These contractors who mainly work as third-party contractors of the ECG perform various works on behalf of the company.
The training was necessitated in a bid to bring them abreast to ECG’s practices and adherence to operational and safety protocols.
Lead facilitator, Dr. George Eduful, who is General Manager of ECG’s Energy Consulting and Telco Business Directorate said, that “it has become necessary for the company to take measures to ensure that its power distribution infrastructure is designed to standards and presents no danger to the technical staff and contractors”.
He also added that there is therefore a need for “electrical contractors engaged by ECG need to stay up-to-date with the latest advancements in the field, while ensuring they are adhering to regulations for safe installations.”
The ECG Director of the Training Centre, Ing. Aheng Owusu-Afriyie spoke about the aim of the training center to provide competent and practical knowledge while ensuring that safety remains paramount for all practitioners. He indicated that the training center provides training for a number of different reasons and needs, mainly in technical issues.
Ing. Owusu-Afriyie led Journalists on a tour of the Training Center where he spoke about the various installations at the center, and how they have been intentionally done to mimic field installations, such that “trainees who come here are taken through vigorous sessions such that once they get to the field, they will be abreast with relevant skills to handle situations”.
The tour covered a substation and what is know as Lifeline. Explaining this, Ing. Owusu-Afriyie explained that the Lifeline basically means that when faults occur on the network, customers will not have to suffer an outage while the repaid works go on. Instead, the power supply will be on and the technical staff will be working on it, ensuring that customers will not go suffer outages.
The ECG Training Center provides technical training and support for a number of players in the nation’s energy sector, including others from the West African sub region.
The President of the Ghana Electrical Contractors Association, Mr. Awal Sakib Muhammed, spoke positively about this training, adding that it is meant to ensure that the practice remains sanitised in order to curtail incidents of possible accidents. He praised the ECG management for leading this training program. He also threw caution to the public to desist from buying electrical cables from sources they are not sure of and to buy from trusted sources only. He added that sub standard cables can cause fires, leading to possible loss of life and property.
