Utility tariffs are expected to go up effective 1st February 2023. This was announced by the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission on Monday January 16th 2023 amidst the economic hardships Ghanaians are cruising through.
Electricity to go up by 29.69 percent whiles water sails up to an adjustment of 8.3 percent.
Even though the Commission is equally mindful of the current difficult economic circumstances but noted that the potential for outages would be catastrophic for Ghana and has to be avoided. The PURC, therefore, sought to balance prevention of extended power outages and its deleterious implications on jobs and livelihoods with minimizing the impact of rate increases on consumers.
In defense of their action the PURC added, for the end-user electricity tariffs payable by consumers, the Commission considered four key factors in arriving at its decision.
These were the Ghana Cedi/US Dollar exchange rate, inflation, generation mix and the weighted average cost of natural gas.