Minster of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola as disclosed that once the current challenges confronting the power sector are fixed, Nigeria will be able to generate 12,000 megawatts of electricity.
The minister said in spite of the challenges, the country’s power sector still possessed the capacity to advance its power generation, transmission and distribution potentials through other energy supply sources.
“There are many perspectives to do this. The country has today the capacity to generate at least 12,000 MW. If we fix all what is not working in the industry, including building any new power plant, the country would be generating close to 12,000 MW,” he said.
According to the minister, meeting that target has been difficult because out of over 140 turbines, only about half has been able to get gas to work with.
The nation’s power generating capacity, he said, reached 5,000 MW before the recent spate of vandalism of gas pipelines, adding that the industry was already heading towards another milestone prior to the recent outages as a result of the blow up at the Chevron oil platform.
Mr. Fashola said the repairs of the pipelines would soon be completed to take the industry back to about 3000 MW capacity, adding that his ministry was looking at ways to bypass and evacuate condensates, so that more gas could be supplied and the industry able to generate up to about 3,800 MW.
On crazy billing by power distribution companies to consumers, the minister advised consumers to demand electricity meters to ensure that they were paying for only what they actually consumed.
No comments:
Post a Comment