Communities across the Upper East and North East regions have had 37 faulty electricity transformers and 189 broken utility poles replaced since 2022, following regulatory pressure by the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission on the Northern Electricity Distribution Company, according to figures presented at a media engagement.
Pious Abdulai Ikililu, the Commission’s regional public relations officer, said the replacements came after NEDCo repeatedly cited unavailability of equipment as reason for delayed repairs, leaving communities in darkness for weeks and sometimes months.
“NEDCo was giving them a clear goal, they don’t have transformers available, so it will be difficult to get the transformer. But through the intervention, when these issues were reported to the office, the office quickly stepped in,” he said.
A total of 37 transformers were replaced between 2022 and the first quarter of 2026: 7 in 2022, 10 in 2023, 8 in 2024, 8 in 2025, and 4 in the first quarter of 2026. The transformers range from 100 KVA to 50 KVA capacity units. Ikililu described one instance in which a transformer toppled during a storm, plunging an entire community into darkness.
“Due to the rain and the storm, the team went down and the whole transformer even fell and the whole community was blinded in darkness. But after a few days, through the Commission’s intervention, they got a new transformer and power was restored,” he said.
The Commission facilitated the replacement of 189 utility poles between 2022 and the first quarter of 2026. Broken poles replaced include both high-capacity (HC) and low-pressure (LP) configurations. In 2022, 35 poles were replaced; in 2023, 74; in 2024, 50; in 2025, 19; and 11 poles so far in 2026.
Ikililu noted that the recorded figures likely understate actual replacements, as some cases go unreported to the Commission.
“There are even some of them that the consumers have not reported back, so we’ve not been able to capture them,” Ikililu said.
Twenty-four electricity meters were also replaced or provided as new service connections between 2022 and 2024, following Commission intervention in cases where applicants had applied for connections but not received them by the regulatory deadline.
Additionally, in 2026, the Commission investigated widespread consumer reports of rapidly depleting prepaid meter credits across the region, surveying communities throughout the Upper East to gather evidence before summoning ECG and issuing orders to resolve the issue.
The Commission also credited the removal of the security deposit requirement, previously GH¢200 for residential and GH¢500 for non-residential consumers, as a key consumer protection achievement. Ikililu said the Commission discovered NEDCo had been retaining the deposits without crediting them back after six months as required by law.
“200 years on, that money hasn’t been paid back into the account and NEDCo hasn’t accounted for it. So we wrote a series of letters to our head office and our legal director, and they took it on. And as we speak, if you take the quotation letters from NEDCo, you wouldn’t see the security deposit.”
A1 Radio | 101.1 MHz | Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith | Bolgatanga
