The Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu, has said that the national grid, which collapsed a few days ago, has now been recovered.
The national electricity grid suffered a system collapse twice this week.
But briefing journalists on Wednesday after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting presided over by the Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo,the Minister said the grid is back.
Mr Aliyu said several resolutions have emerged from a series of emergency meetings held by the power ministry, where all stakeholders have extensively discussed the issues and resolved all bickering.
The minister, who likened Nigeria’s power challenge to a war situation, further maintained that the country generates up to 8,000 MW.
According to Aliyu, the shortage of gas and maintenance of generators, the fuel situation (which he argued has been addressed by the NNPC), all combined to exacerbate the problem with the national grid.
“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 scheduled maintenance, and it is supposed to be scheduled outage, but we had not envisaged that we will have issues around vandalisation of pipelines, which the NNPC has addressed as you can see 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 is around gas. You need to have a gas contract between generating companies and gas suppliers — some are from contracts, some are not. We are looking into this and have proffered some solutions in some few days to mature”.
The minister also spoke on the issue of the quantity of generated electricity in the country, saying “we have the capacity of 8,000 megawatts — the one on the grid, embedded 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,” he added.
The power minister equally affirmed that the Federal Executive Council has given approval of N5 billion to open up and expand Lagos/Ogun, to reinforce power supply to that region.
