Nigeria’s Minister of Power Works and Housing, Mr Babatunde Fashola, says there is currently not enough power to distribute unless more turbines are switched on.
He attributed recent power outages in some parts of the country to four turbines which stopped working, but hoped electricity supply would be stabilized soon as three of the four turbines have been restored.
The Minister also expressed hope that President Muhammadu Buhari’s 10,000 megawatts target would be met.
He, however, decried acts of vandalism which he says is causing some of the energy problems in the country.
In a rather sad development, Nigeria’s power generation collapsed completely on Thursday at exactly 12.58pm to zero megawatt and this persisted for about three hours.
Data from the country’s System Operator showed that around 1pm on Thursday, no power generation company in Nigeria produced a single megawatt of electricity.
Industry operators told our correspondent that as a result of the complete collapse, no electricity distribution company received load allocation beginning from when the collapse was recorded up till around 3pm.
The SO stated that the 11 distribution companies got zero electricity load allocation during the period of the collapse, meaning that for about three hours on Thursday no part of Nigeria got power supply from the national grid.
Our correspondent, however, gathered that supply of electricity was restored around 3pm.
For instance, out of the 450MW that was due Abuja Electricity Distribution Company, the Disco only got about 50MW when the situation began to improve.
Before the collapse, AEDC got an allocation of 257.97MW and the nationwide generation level stood at 2,243.2MW.
Sources in the sector blamed the complete collapse in power generation on the extent of destruction of infrastructure and gas pipelines vandalism that had happened in the industry over the past years, as well as the poor upgrade of power installations across the country.
No comments:
Post a Comment