The Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu, has said that lack of gas, the maintenance that some of the generators are undergoing have been the factors causing the current power collapse across the country.
“The more reason we are facing the situation now is as a result of the shortage of gas and some of the generators that have to go into maintenance.”
The minister, who briefed newsmen today, March 16 shortly after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting at the Presidential villa, Abuja, said that he had summoned all the stakeholders’ meeting with a view to finding urgent solution to the problem.
“I challenged all of them; I said this is like a war situation; we need to find solutions. We need to come out with answers—quick ones, emergency solutions because the power on the grid has dropped due to those things that affected it— lack of gas, the maintenance that some of the generators are undergoing.”
Abubakar Aliyu emphasized that the drop in the supply as a result of the collapse of the grid has triggered some responses, adding that some have started to trip down and caused the whole system to go down.
“We had, the day before yesterday, recovered it. We are on top of it. We have recovered it now. The grid is back. We are trying to get more megawatts to push on to the grid through the aforementioned meeting.
Abubakar Aliyu said that committees have been set up, all geared towards getting more mega watts to put on the grid as basically, stressing that there is need to have gas contract between generating companies and gas supplies.
He said that all the variables were being looked into and some solutions have been proffered which would come into fruition soon.
“We have capacity of 8,000 mega watts – the one on the grid, embedded and captive. If you combine all of them, what is happening now is as a result of all these problems that we are encountering and we are on top of it. Very soon, we will come out of it.’’
The minister said that his ministry had received an approval of N5 billion from FEC for compensation to project affected persons in the expansion of the Lagos/Ogun line with six sub-stations.
