The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) has giving insight into the causes of the current black being experienced in most parts of the country, attributing to catalogue of issues in the electricity supply chain.
NERC Chairman, Sanusi Garba, who gave comprehensive explanations, however assured electricity consumers that most of the problems were being sorted out, adding that normal power supply will soon be restored.
He, in company of other directors of the commission, spoke to Journalists on Wednesday in an apparent bid to douse concerns being expressed by electricity consumers due to the consecutive two-day systems collapses resulting into blackouts in most parts of the country.
He enumerated that the problems include that electricity generation has dropped from about 5300 MW in October 2021 to about 4300 MW in March, 2022, the drop in power generation by the hydro plants from 1350 MW in October 2021 to about 1100 MW, vandalisation of gas pipeline, cleaning of liquids in gas pipeline, among other hindrances.
According to Garba, “In terms of quality of supply, supply of electricity generation has dropped from about 5300 in October 2021 to about 4350 In March, a drop of about 1000 megawatts.
“Now for just for clarification in October 2021 Hydros already with a 1350. They are down to about 1100 But that’s not enough to clearly explain by there’s so much outages across the country.
“The reality is normally at this time of year when the Hydros are down and generations from the three hydro plants is down, the gas plants which currently contribute about 80% of the generation capacity they ramp up to cover the shortfall in generation on hydro, because obviously all the hydro plants do water management and so on.
“Unfortunately, at this time of the year when the gas plants are supposed to increase generation, we have had a number of multiple events that contributed to the lack of capacity to deliver to cover up the shortfall in generation capacity stated by the power plant owned by AGIP and NNPC. That was act of vandalism on the pipeline which obviously subdue generation in those plants.
“And then we also have the gas power plant in Calabar which has generation capacity of about 500 megawatts owned by the Niger Delta power holding company. They had planned to clean the gas pipeline of liquids in the gas pipeline and we have tried to push forward this cleaning exercise and unfortunately there was so much liquid in the pipeline that it couldn’t be pushed forward again.”
The NERC Chairman however, expressed optimism that the catalogue of problems would soon be over, noting that these multiplicity of events presents a perfect storm for the industry.
“But I want to say that on a positive note, all hands are on deck to remedy the situation, gas supply is being installed to the pipelines”, he added.
