22nd July, 2019
Nigeria at the moment has an installed capacity of 13,000 megawatts. On average, it produces over 5,000 megawatts, out of which only four thousand gets to the electricity consumers.
President Buhari said today his government wants to correct this disjoint between power produced and power delivered and has engaged SIEMEN AG to do just that.
Buhari met in Abuja today, Mr Joe Kaeser, CEO and President of the German company, where he unfolded the reason for the meeting and what he wants SIEMENS to do for Nigeria.
He recalled past failed attempts to solve Nigeria’s endemic power shortages and his government’s efforts to change the narration.
‘These various interventions to solving the electricity problem have yielded an imbalance between the amount of power generated and the amount available for consumers. Despite over 13,000 megawatts of power generation capacity, only an average of 4,000 megawatts reliably reaches consumers.
‘Now, we have an excellent opportunity to address this challenge.
“This Government’s priority was to stabilise the power generation and gas supply sector through the Payment Assurance Facility, which led to a peak power supply of 5,222 MW. Nonetheless, the constraints remained at the transmission and distribution systems.
“This is why I directed my team to ask Siemens and our Nigerian stakeholders to first focus on fixing the transmission and distribution infrastructure – especially around economic centres where jobs are created”, Buhari said.
President Buhari reiterated the ambition of his government to deliver electricity to Nigerian businesses and homes.
“My challenge to Siemens, our partner investors in the Distribution Companies, the Transmission Company of Nigeria and the Electricity Regulator is to work hard to achieve 7,000 megawatts of reliable power supply by 2021 and 11,000 megawatts by 2023 – in phases 1 and 2 respectively.
“After these transmission and distribution system bottlenecks have been fixed, we will seek – in the third and final phase – to drive generation capacity and overall grid capacity to 25,000 megawatts”, he said.
Read Buhari’s full speech:http://staging.pmnewsnigeria.com/2019/07/22/buhari-siemens-ag-in-nigeria-to-modernise-power-distribution/
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