The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) has said that the actual technical calculation it released on Wednesday with the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), generation and distribution companies indicates that power generation would hit 4,500 megawatts (MW) by June and 6,000 megawatts by December 2014.
Speaking at a monthly meeting with chief executive officers of generation, distribution companies and TCN, Sam Amadi, NERC chairman, said that 10,000 megawatts was never on the agenda of the regulator for this year, observing that there was a marked difference between political an
d technical targets.
He, however, assured that the companies are working very hard to improve power supply, urging Nigerians to pay their electricity bills promptly.
Amadi also said that the stakeholders spoke on the need to unlock gas and ensure that more gas regularly go to the power plants, if 6,000 megawatts would be achieved by December.
He announced that the commission has secured the permission of President Goodluck Jonathan to disconnect government ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) that failed to pay their bills.
“Let’s put it this way, targets could be political and could be technical. When the Multi Year Tariff Order (MYTO) benchmarked the targets based on the feedbacks we get from generators, for example for the National Integrated Power Project (NIPP) in our MYTO, we benchmarked 7,200 megawatts for December 2013. That is based on the assumption of gas supply and commissioning of NIPP plants and the existing capacities of the successor companies. That is a technical benchmarking based on feedbacks. Now, we did not do anywhere near that because we didn’t have enough gas. What is going on now is that we are going back to doing reviews.
“When we do the tariff reviews, we will now tell you this is what we think will happen in 2014, 2015 and so on. There is also the government agenda. If the minister says he wants everybody to do minimum of 4,500 megawatts we take that and we work with our people and start to work with the system to work to that point. I want us to get it clear. There is regulated benchmarking which is based on the feedback and the kinds of technical questions that we get from the operators. We look at gas supply, we look at their capacity, we look at the programmes they want to implement. For example, Transcorp Ughelli is proposing some investment in capacity to increase generation, Egbin has applied to increase capacity out of a plant that was refurbished for another 200 megawatts. Those are the ones that we can predict.
“I want to say it that the government is right to set benchmarks and what we do is within technical possibilities, to meet those benchmarks. And 4,500 megawatts by June is what they are working on. We can exceed that, but it is a target that we are all working on. We are not just working towards 4,500 megawatts by June, we want to ensure that more effective supply, distribution of effective power gets to Nigerians,” Amadi said.
TEDDY NWANUNOBI, Abuja
