coolbis:
mr Buhari inherited practically nothing, our 4000mw was just on paper. That was the same 4000mw he(mr Jonathan) claimed after his 100days in office in 2011,yet no improvement in the power supply. For close to two years, I did not enjoy a minute of power supply in my house between 6pm and 6am. Jonathan was the biggest mistake nigerians ever made, he was a fraud personified. There is roughly 10,000 Mega Watts of electricity generating capacity of which 5000Mega watts have be made available and usable PER THE PROJECT PLAN AND SCHEDULE IN EFFECT SINCE 2012.The next 5000Mega Watts is currently being added and it takes time alli the work of Brother Jona .Now go hang your self. EMANY01:
There are currently 23 grid connected generating plants in operation in the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry with a total installed capacity of 10,396.0MW and available capacity of 6,056MW........
Source : KPMG- Guide to the Nigerian Power Sector
http://www.kpmg.com/Africa/en/IssuesAndInsights/Articles-Publications/Documents/Guide%20to%20the%20Nigerian%20Power%20Sector.pdf
The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Ikeja Electric, Mr. Abiodun Ajifowobaje, in this interview with ‘FEMI ASU, says a chunk of the nation’s installed generation capacity of not less than 10,000 megawatts remains stranded largely due to gas shortfall.Source:
http://www.punchng.com/business/energy/nigerias-power-generation-capacity-almost-10000mw-ajifowobaje/
Now 15 months after the power sector was privatised, has it been ‘so far, so good’?
Before I say anything on privatisation, I think we have to say something about what led to the privatisation in the first instance. As we are aware, 10 years before that privatisation, there had been little or no government funding in the power sector. Therefore there had been serious challenges in transmission, generation and distribution networks. For us to at least give minimum power supply to the Nigerian populace, conservatively we need nothing less than 10,000MW. At the time the privatisation was done, the highest we had reached was about 4,500MW, and that was briefly, not on a continuous basis……..……..As things developed, it became very apparent that government could not, with other competing areas like health and education, give adequate funding to the power sector, but to allow investors to come in and bring in technology, ready management and of course funding that were not coming from the government. So, about 15 months ago, November 1, 2013, the companies were handed over to the private sector after following a very rigorous bidding process, which was termed as one of the most transparent in privatisation history in Africa, and since that time, all the investors have been doing everything within their power to see that at least they do more to see that power gets to the people.
What are the challenges facing the private investors who bought the privatised firms?
The first challenge that the investors faced was that it was when we took over that we started analysing the problems in the sector. You will recall that during the privatisation scheme, there were a lot of union activities and they refused any investors from coming in to do physical inspection of the networks. For you to be able to plan, you have to know what is on the ground.…………..At Ikeja Electric, we had to start doing technical audit, customer enumeration for us to actually know what is on the ground, and this took time. …..
……But what I want to say is that the power sector is not like any other sector. It takes a lot of time for anything you put on the ground to materialise. I know that Nigerians want to see things improve almost overnight. That is not the case with the power sector – after doing all the due diligence on the networks, we have to look for funds to do all the necessary corrections, we have to look for the money to do all the metering…………..
The country achieved the peak generation of 4,517.6MW of electricity on December 23, 2012. But more than two years after then, we are still struggling to reach 4,000MW. For how long must things get worse before getting better?
The capacities that were there at the time we attained the highest peak are still there. Not only that, the NIPP project has added between 3,000 and 5,000MW. So, when we are talking about installed capacity today in Nigeria, it cannot be less than 10,000MW. In fact, Transcorp in Sapele and Egbin in Lagos have added additional capacity since they took over. For Egbin, Unit 6 was already moribund but has added 200MW to that. [size=18pt][b]So, as I am talking to you now, we have almost 10,000MW on standby. But why are we not getting it? Simply gas issues. Number one, we are not getting enough gas to power the power stations. Not only that, even the little gas that we get, every day, we see pipeline vandalism……..……. .Early last month, we were giving our customers almost 12 to 15-hour power supply, but in the last one or two weeks, it has reduced to eight hours because they said the gas pipelines had been vandalized. Not only that, this is the time we have low water for the hydro power stations. So with the gas not getting to the thermal power plants, and the water at the dams at the lowest level, this is the worst period for power to come from the grid. ………[/b][/size]
What investments or projects should customers expect from your firm, apart from the embedded generation and smart metering?
As I said earlier, If I want to give my customers constant power, I need 1,250MW. But the question is can the network carry that? From what we have on the ground now, I will say ‘no’. But before the takeover, I think the highest we have ever attained here was about 650MW. But today, all the little problems that used to disturb operations have been addressed; so that if power comes now, I can assure you that we can take 1,000MW. Based on the study that we are carrying out on our lines immediately we finished that, we will come out with a programme on how to expand the system...... |
