The Nigerian electricity supply industry has continued to face a real and present danger of collapse despite the efforts made in more than two decades to initiate a reform of the sector.
It is sad that the periodic and now routine system collapses we experience are mostly occasioned by avoidable situations like fire outbreaks at critical transmission lines across our major cities often resulting from a lack of diligent attention.
It is rather distressing that the total installed capacity for Nigeria, a country of more than 200 million people and about 40 million small businesses, is a mere 13,000 Megawatts. Worse still, only about 3,500mws are available for homes and businesses from the grid and
sometimes it goes as low as 2,500mw. Clearly, this is unacceptable. We can contrast the available supply of electricity with competitor countries in Africa like Egypt and South Africa with respective populations of approximately 112m and 59.6m people supplying about 60,000mw and
58,000 respectively. This difference in energy wattage has massive implications for human development and economic growth. Nigeria today has the world’s lowest per capita electricity wattage in the world, interestingly lower than those of most of our West African neighbours.
It is really sad that whereas our energy demand is above 200,000mws, we have only 13,000mw installed capacity and can only deliver regularly less than 4,000mw. After my consultations with experts in the sector,
I have realized that the crisis of power supply in Nigeria relates to two major sectors: (1) generation, and (2) transmission and distribution. The major challenges of the generation sector are the lack of a regular supply of gas arising from the failure of the government in
the last 8 years to provide adequate gas infrastructure facilities, weak commercial availability of gas for power and failure to control the restiveness of angry youths leading to vandalism.
It is worrisome that for more than 8 years , we could not resolve the infrastructural bottlenecks that constrain the supply of gas to power plants, despite billions spent from CBN for legacy gas debts.
On the transmission and distribution side, the last 8 years have witnessed an embarrassing failure to overcome the deterioration of networks and transmission and distribution networks and invest in modern technologies like SCADA,
leading to poor coverage, lack of effective coordination between TCN and discos, leading to load rejection and inability to generate public trust for policy reform on tariff and leading to low private sector investments.
@PeterObi You could have made ur point without trying 2 exonerate ur former party’s (PDP) time in power. Ascribing the Power situation in d country 2 the last 8yrs is hypocritical, even when we all know how monies running in2 billions of Naira under Obj "alloted" 2 power achieved nothing.
@PeterObi On the Nigeria electrical supply, how many Independent Power Plant(IPP) did you build in your state as Governor???