FG Says That National Grid Has Been Restored
The Federal Government has stated that the recent national grid failure has been resolved.
Engineer Abubakar Aliyu, the Minister of Power, said this Wednesday while answering questions from State House media following the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting at the Presidential Villa in Abuja, which was presided over by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.
Apart from the issue of the dams’ water levels dropping, he added there were other factors that contributed to the statewide power outage.
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The collapse of the grid, scheduled facility maintenance, pipeline vandalism, and conflicts over gas availability and payment for gas contracts between gas firms and power generating corporations are among the difficulties he highlighted as contributing to the current power crisis.
“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 a scheduled maintenance and it is supposed to be scheduled outage, but we had not envisaged that we will have issues around vandalization 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.
“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 around gas. You need to have gas contract between generating companies and gas suppliers- some are form contracts, some are not. We are looking into this and have proffered some solutions in some few days to mature,”he said.
Aliyu also made clarification on the issue of the quantity of generated electricity in the country, saying “we have capacity of 8,000 megawatts – the one on the grid, imbedded and captive. 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”.
