The Federal Government of Nigeria failed in its attempt to bring the country's electricity generation to 6000 Megawatts of electricity by December 2009. Kano based industrialist, Alhaji Mohammed Umar made this statement about the government's attempt:
"It is only an irresponsible leadership that would set an unrealizable target for itself. Why did government set a target when it knew it was not in control of a critical component such as gas supply? In more advanced countries, this is more than enough to cost a government its tenure. But not here, I bet you nothing will happen," he said.
The Minister of Power, Dr. Babalola made this statement:
"Towards the 6000 MW target, PHCN is repairing some of the generating plants units in Afam, Sapele, and Ughelli. In terms of machines available to highlight some of the issues in gas supply, we have about 5300 MW of capacity available. With those units being repaired and one of the IPPs being finished, we should be able to have the 6000 MW.
"Two things at any point in time will determine what you generate, number one is the demand that I just explained and the other one is gas supply. Gas supply has actually improved as we have seen over the past several months that it is a pure constraint in power production in Nigeria.
We expect that production will vary from base load which is when demand is low especially at night. Anything from about 4000 MW during the day, that is why we want to ensure that we have at least 6000 MW to be able to cope with the demand when it is needed,"
"What determines actual generation is gas. It's just like your car, what determines the distance it covers is the amount of fuel in it. If you have a full tank you can cover more mileage. What we have seen so far is that if gas supply improves, and we expect more to be available before the end of the year.
With the Niger Delta issue then, most of the gas supply pipelines were badly affected and one of the major plants, that is the one operated by Chevron was out for a long time but they are fixing that now and that alone accounts for about 2000 mmscf per day or 800 MW of electricity generation per day," he said.
Vanguard
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