The Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu, has attributed the current power situation in the country to shortage of gas.
At the Federal Executive Council(FEC) meeting in Abuja, on Wednesday, the minister said that efforts were being made to address the situation, adding that Nigeria had the capacity of 8,000Mw on the grid, embedded and captive.
“The issue we are currently facing now was not only as a result of the level of water, which most of you captured in your reports; that is part of it; but it is not much from that angle.
“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 into maintenance.
“It is a scheduled maintenance and it is supposed to be scheduled outage but we had not envisaged that we will have issues around vandalism of pipelines.
”Which the NNPC has addressed as you can see evidently everywhere, aviation fuel, and petrol in the filling stations; it is a combination of many factors.
“That compounded the problem we are having on the grid.’’
“The generators are not supplying because of lack of gas; so, I know some of you are aware; just two days ago, I summoned an emergency meeting which was unprecedented’’, the minister said.
He said that for the first time, he brought in all the sector players—from NNPC, Agip, Shell to the regulator, NERC, the GENCOS like the Niger-Delta Power Company, the TCN and the ministry.
Abubakar said that the meeting, which involved the adviser to the president on infrastructure, lasted for the whole day trying to proffer a solution.
He said that all the variables were being looked into and some solutions had been proffered which would come into fruition soon.
“We have capacity of 8,000 mega watts – the one on the grid, embedded and captive.
“If you combine all of them, what is happening now is as a result of all these problems that we are encountering and we are on top of it; very soon, we will come out of it.’’
The minister said that his ministry had received an approval of N5 billion from FEC for compensation to project affected persons in the expansion of the Lagos/Ogun line with six sub-stations.
