Nigeria’s Niger Delta Power Holding Company has completed the second phase of its 2026 Insurance Risk Engineering Survey at two of its flagship power stations, the Omotosho plant in Ondo State and the Sapele facility in Delta State, as the state-owned generator steps up efforts to align its assets with international safety standards and bolster its standing with global underwriters.
The assessments, which concluded on Friday, 13 February, were conducted in partnership with international insurance partners and spanned equipment condition reviews, operational safety audits, maintenance protocols, and environmental risk evaluations. The exercises form part of a rolling programme across NDPHC’s generation fleet, which was built under the National Integrated Power Project, a federal government initiative aimed at closing Nigeria’s persistent electricity supply gap.
The completion of the survey represents a notable milestone for a company that has long faced scrutiny over plant availability and the structural fragilities of Nigeria’s power grid.
For NDPHC, demonstrating credible risk governance is as much about maintaining competitive insurance terms as it is about operational discipline, a dual imperative that company executives were keen to underscore.
“Periodic risk engineering evaluations are essential to safeguarding the company’s investments and ensuring sustainable power generation in line with global best practices,” said Omololu Agoro, NDPHC’s executive director for finance and accounts, who represented management at a feedback session held following the conclusion of the exercise. Agoro added that findings from the survey would feed into the company’s continuous improvement framework, with a particular focus on improving plant availability and refining maintenance scheduling.
The completion of on-site inspections at Omotosho and Sapele follows an earlier phase of the 2026 programme, suggesting NDPHC is accelerating the cadence of its risk assessments, a move that analysts say could support efforts to secure more favourable coverage terms in a tightening global energy insurance market. Power sector assets in developing markets have faced increasing scrutiny from underwriters sensitive to governance shortfalls and chronic underinvestment in maintenance.
The feedback session was also the occasion for a valedictory ceremony marking the retirement of Mike Corbett, a risk engineering specialist at Zurich Insurance Group in the United Kingdom, who has worked alongside NDPHC for 13 years. His departure drew warm tributes from management and plant personnel, who credited him with materially raising the company’s risk engineering standards over more than a decade of collaboration.
Corbett’s tenure encompassed multiple inspection cycles across NDPHC’s generation facilities, work that participants said had improved regulatory and insurer confidence in the company’s asset base. His exit underscores a broader challenge for Nigerian power companies seeking to cultivate deep technical partnerships with international counterparts — relationships that take years to build but provide crucial access to global insurance markets and risk mitigation expertise.
NDPHC, which manages a portfolio of gas-fired power plants procured under the NIPP scheme, occupies an unusual position in Nigeria’s electricity sector. Fully owned by the federal government through the Niger Delta Power Holding Company, it has thus far been excluded from the privatisation programme that transferred most generation and distribution assets to private hands under the 2013 power sector reforms. That ownership structure has given the company greater operational continuity but has also insulated it, critics say insufficiently, from the commercial disciplines that private operators face.
Nigeria generates well below its installed capacity of roughly 13,000 megawatts, with actual dispatch typically constrained to between 4,000 and 5,000 megawatts by gas supply shortages, grid instability, and distribution bottlenecks. Against that backdrop, NDPHC’s investment in rigorous risk engineering surveys signals an attempt to position its plants as dependable anchors in a sector where reliability remains the defining challenge.
