Electric Power Supply drops to 3,655mwpower

POWER PLANT

Electricity generation has dropped from over 3,700megawatts, mw to 3,655mw as a result of reduction in gas supply to power plants.

Investigations showed that the fall in gas supply was fuelled by pipeline vandalism in some oil pro­ducing areas.

“A source in a major gas supply­ing company who confirmed the de­velopment over the weekend main­tained that the vandals might have mistaken the pipelines to be carry­ing petroleum products.”

However, the Presidential Task Force of Power indicated that the nation’s power stations collec­tively generated 3,655mw of which 3,565.09mw was distributed while the balance was used to stabilise the system.

The Director General of the La­gos Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Mr. Muda Yusuf said sup­ply would likely improve following expected increase in rainfall.

Yusuf who explained that in­creased rainfall has culminated in increased use of hydro stations to generate electricity added that whenever it rains heavily, the nation always witness an improvement in power because of improved perfor­mance of hydro plants.

“There are indications that the coming of the rainy season has swelled the dams to generate more power than in the past. Con­sequently, the nation’s hydro sta­tions have done better than they used to do in the early part of the year when there was not much rainfall.”

The Director General tasked stakeholders to ensure they sus­tain the relatively high level of supply, and even increase it further in order to meet the great expecta­tions of consumers in the coming months.

This may be an uphill task as in­vestigations showed that the sector is threatened by many challenges, including lack of funds, low gas supply, poor facilities, vandalism and inadequate meters.

Already, the Nigerian Electric­ity Regulatory Commission, NERC has indicated before the recent im­provement, it had noticed with con­cern the acute shortage in power supply and the attendant hardship Nigerians experienced.

It maintained that in the last couple of months, electricity sup­ply had been generally poor on account of increase in vandalism in the run up to the April 2015 elec­tions. But this bad supply condition has worsened in the last few days.

“At present, 18 out of the 23 pow­er plants in the country are unable to generate electricity due shortage of gas supply to the thermal plants with one of the hydro stations faced with water management issue. This has led to loss of over 2,000mega­watts in the national grid. This situ­ation is further compounded by the recent industrial actions embarked upon by workers in the oil and gas industry, a development which is taking toll on other sectors of the economy. Gas supplies to the ther­mal plants have been further con­strained by the industrial actions of workers in the oil and gas industry.”

“The Commission had proac­tively engaged the gas supply com­panies and its licencees when two weeks ago discussion was held on how to firm up gas supply in order to increase power supply. Unfortu­nately, not much progress was made through this meeting as the Nigeri­an National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and its subsidiary Nigeria Gas Company, disclosed of high in­cidence of vandalism in some areas that were relatively peaceful along its pipeline networks.”