House Power Committee Assures on Improved Electricity

The  chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Power, Mr. Mogaji Aliyu on Wednesday said that about 2,000 megawatts will soon be added to the National grid.

Mr. Mogaji Aliyu spoke after the committee meeting visited the Ogorode Generation company, Sapele, Delta State, “to see first hand the challenges facing the power plant”.

The Chairman of the committee who led other members of the committee to the power plant told newsmen in Sapele that the visit was to ensure that challenges facing it is addressed to ensure Nigerians get quality power supply.

Aliyu said “this is  one of the NIPP Projects in Nigeria and I am highly impressed with what I saw, we have heard of their challenges in terms of evacuation, certainly something will be done about that.

“We have gone to almost four power plants now, like this one has about 500 megawatt capacity, we have seen the Azura, we have seen the other ones they will give you about 2,000 megawatt capacity put together”.

According to him,  “we will look at all the efficiencies and inefficiencies and l  assure Nigerians that in no distant time, these challenges would be resolved and things would be done differently”.

“Every day we are below 3,000MW capacity so we are here to find out whether it is the TCN or whether it is the Discos that have refused to take power. Already this plant now is shut down, I do not understand why it should be shut down we have call the system operator and we have discussed. If TCN has obsolete infrastructure that has to be revamped. Even Discos are refusing to take power because of what they call load rejection, government has given them good tariff now, they must invest”

Aliyu noted that  President Muhammadu Buhari has already directed that about three million Pre-paid Meters be provided for electricity consumers in Nigeria.

“My own argument is that I want the Discos to be in charge not the Ministry. I will ensure that the Benin Disco do the needful on the issue of metering.

“The  National Assembly has declared estimated bill as illegal. So if I want to cause trouble now, I will tell Nigerians not to pay for estimated bills,” Aliyu said.

The Managing Director of the Niger Delta Power Holding (NDPH), Mr Chiedu Ugbo who welcome the lawmakers to the plant has four gas turbines installed at 504MW capacity.

Ugbo also disclosed that the plant has about 504MW of power lying idle adding that evacuation was a major challenge in the plant.

“the power station is functioning very well but unfortunately we have frequent starts and stops as a result of dispatch instructions from National Control Centre (NCC), Oshogbo.

“so we only generate when they ask us to generate. They are in charge if the whole network transmission system reliability.

:we have 504 megawatt lying idle here and by so doing we are losing revenue because as you can see the I  staff are idle waiting when they will call up for generation.

These gas turbines are made to run non-stop unless when they are out for maintenance or they have unplanned outage and unplanned repairs that we have to do,” Ugbo said.

According to him, the Presidential Power Initiative with the Semen project will clean up the network for the distribution and we can start generating the idle power, so it is a very good initiative#.