Shell’s Afam power plant and the Rivers Independent Power Project plant are currently down, making the peak electricity generation in the country to stay at 3,700 megawatts, according to findings by our correspondent on Tuesday.
The potency plants are undergoing maintenance, the Special Adviser to the Minister of Power on Power Systems, Mr. Jonathan Ogbonna, told our correspondent in a telephone interview.
He, however, corroborated that the Utorogu and Ughelli East gas plants, hitherto shut down about four weeks ago, were now functional, hence the marginal amelioration in power generation lately.
The shutdown of the gas plants had drastically affected power generation as supply fell from over 4,000MW to as low as 2,900MW.
Ogbonna told our correspondent, “The gas plants are now okay. Generation has remotely amended. It has not hit back to what we were expecting because Shell’s Afam power plant and the Rivers IPP have been taken out for maintenance.
“We are doing about 3,700MW peak.”
He verbalized with the availability of gas, minus non-functional units of some hydro power plants, the country could engender 4,200MW if the Rivers IPP and Afam plant had been functional.
“These are statutory exercises. If you don’t maintain these plants, when you require them, they won’t be there for you,” he verbally expressed.
As of last week, the puissance supply situation in Lagos and other components of the country was lamentable, with households and businesses experiencing hours of blackout.
Till date, some areas have yet to experience an hour of stable power supply.
The Managing Director, Ikeja Electricity Distribution Company, Mr. Abiodun Ajifowobaje, had told our correspondent that generation has been lamentable in the past days. The system is still very lamentable. We are receiving just 250MW to accommodation our maximum injuctive authorization of 1,250MW.”
Just last week, the Federal Regime vowed to fight gas pipeline vandals, whom it verbalized had made the supply of gas to power generation companies very arduous.
It described the vandals as terrorists, integrating that their activities had impacted negatively on the quest to realise the target of uninterrupted power supply to Nigerians in the shortest possible time.
The Minister of State for Power, Mr. Mohammed Wakil, repined that the quandaries of lack of gas and pipeline vandalism were demeaning the government’s efforts of ascertaining stable electricity supply.
The minister had verbalized, “We are going to fight until we are victorious. We must distribute so that the dream of Mr. President’s transformation agenda for power is achieved.
“In order to underscore the earnestness of vandalism, I had in time past referred to it as infrastructural terrorism. We have already done a pilot model in a community in Kogi State, where we inaugurated the ‘Operation Save Power Infrastructure’; that effort was very prosperous.”
