Nigerian Government has said the national power grid that collapsed earlier in the week has been restored.
The national electricity grid suffered a system collapse twice this week.
Abubakar Aliyu, minister of power, disclosed this while speaking with state house correspondents after the federal executive council (FEC) meeting presided over by Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo at the presidential villa on Wednesday in Abuja.
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Aliyu explained that there were other challenges that led to the nationwide power outage apart from the drop in water level at dams, some of which it said were not envisaged.
He, however, said the problems are already being addressed.
Aliyu identified the challenges that contributed to the power crisis to include the collapse of the grid, scheduled maintenance of facilities, vandalisation of pipelines, and issues regarding gas availability and contracts between gas companies and power generating companies.
The minister stated;
The more reason we are facing the situation now is as a result of the shortage of gas, and some of the generators have to go to maintenance. It is scheduled maintenance, and it is supposed to be scheduled outage, but we had not envisaged that we will have issues around vandalisation of pipelines, which the NNPC has addressed as you can see everywhere, aviation fuel, and petrol in the filling stations.
Aliyu stated;
It is a combination of many factors that compounded the problem we are having on the grid. We have recovered the grid now. The grid is back, and we are trying to get more megawatts to push on the grid. We have set up small committees all geared towards getting more megawatts to put on the grid.
Basically, the problem is around gas. You need to have a gas contract between generating companies and gas suppliers — some are from contracts, some are not. We are looking into this and have proffered some solutions in some few days to mature.
The minister also spoke on the issue of the quantity of generated electricity in the country, saying “we have the capacity of 8,000 megawatts — the one on the grid, embedded and captive”.
He added;
If you combine all of them, you will get these problems that we are encountering. We are on top of the challenge, and very soon, we will come out of it.
Aliyu added the Federal Executive Council has approved the provision of N5 billion to open up and expand Lagos/Ogun, to reinforce power supply to the region.
