Rockin' Rolling Blackouts

I’m sitting here in the semi-dark and I realized that I still haven’t blogged about one of the more salient aspects of my time here in Ghana.  Okay well. –insert sheepish grin– i actually realized that ages ago when Paul arrived and mentioned that I could have at least warned him that we only have power every other day here!

To be precise, we’re on a four day cycle that runs like this:
    Day 1: Scheduled outage in the day from 6am to 6pm (12 hours)
    Day 2: 24 hours of power (barring faults)
    Day 3: Scheduled outage at night, from 6pm to 6am (12 hours)
    Day 4: 24 hours of power

Although if you count a day as midnight to midnight, it actually seems a little more lopsided – the 24hours of power is pretty misleading.  It’s actually such that you have a 12 hour daytime outage followed by 48 hours of power, and then a 12 hour night time outage followed by 24 hours of power.

The back story to this is that the water level in Lake Volta is extremely low, so the hydroelectric dam (operated by the Volta River Authority) is not giving enough power for the nation.  The really sad frustrating thing is that this was entirely predictable – it happens every eight years. The power outages could have been avoided if only the government had turned off the aluminum plant (there’s lots more back story on that) on schedule instead of trying to squeeze just a little more money out of it. But at least Ghana has now struck oil!

The daytime outages aren’t so bad because the place where I’m staying is an office, and they run a generator during work hours. Except when it hits on weekends.  The daytime outages are pretty much on schedule – the power always goes off on time, and then turns back on anywhere from 0-6 hours after it is supposed to turn on. The nightime outages also start on time, but generally end early, with the power turning back on at midnight or so.  Although it’s 1.30am now, and the power is still out today.

I have different means of dealing with the power outages. Tonight, I’m surrounded by smartphones, using the one with the better loudspeaker as an mp3 player (actually mostly country music, not rock), another to check my email, and a third as my normal phone.  Often I actually do use them as flashlights, since they are generally at hand when I need them, although tonight the guys at Arrow Networks (our collaborators on the wireless network project) set me up with a rechargeable lamp, so I don’t have to sit in the dark all night.  Which is actually pretty much what I’ve been doing for the past four weeks. My little flashlights sort of work, but they don’t exactly light up a room and you really need to hold them up to see anything useful.  I have found good places to prop them up though!

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