Reps Summon Bureau, Investors Over Poor Power Supply

The House of Representatives Ad-hoc Committee investigating expenditure in Nigeria’s power sector has invited the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) to appear before it alongside core investors in the power sector over electricity supply challenges in the country.

Chairman of the committee, Hon. Ibrahim Al-Mustapha Aliyu, extended the invitation after the appearance and submission by the director general of BPE, Ayodeji Gbeleyi, at continuation of the panel’s investigative hearing.

Aliyu noted that the president himself was doing his best to see that some settlements were done to make things better, adding that the committee wanted to get to  the root of the matter, resolve it and move forward.

“I’m happy that I have mentioned that there is a considerable improvement from 1999 or 2000, because the generation there is just about 1500 MW altogether for the whole country, and now we are talking about 10,600 installed capacity. We hope that the actual generation may be 10,000 MW. We only will 8,000 and only distribute 4,000.

“So that is the challenge. Maybe we need to work hard to resolve. You have not also told us what arrangements are in place from the BPE on the transmission.

“Since after the Canadian firm left, the transmission service charge and other things may not be too strong enough to service the transmission requirement of the country. That’s why maybe perhaps there has been a great collapse due to the very old installations that can easily give way under first measure,”he said.

In his submission, Ayodeji Gbeleyi told the committee that at the time of privatisation, Kainji and Jebba hydro power plants had a combined output of about 600 MW of power.

He however stated that they now deliver 1,100 MW of power to the grid out of about an average of 5,500 MW per day, which he said was almost 20% from just one operator which he said was one of the impacts that Nigerians have seen.

“At the time of privatisation, Egbi power plant had six turbines, each of them 220 MW, making a total of 1,320 MW. At the time of privatisation, only two of those power plants were operational. Today, all the six turbines are firing and ready to dispatch power to the grid.

“It’s one of the major providers of power to the grid, dispatching any figure between 680 to 900 MW of power, depending on grid capacity, when the grid can offtake that power.

“So there is a mixed grid. Even when we talk about the discourse, sir, the discourse that we knew, or the power holding company that we knew yesterday, is not operating at the same level as the discourse today,” Gbeleyi added.