Melvin Onwubuke
The Federal Government has outlined a plan for increasing the country’s power generation from about 4000 megawatts to between 6000 and 6500 megawatts in the next five or six months.
The Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu disclosed this recently while meeting with Agency heads and stakeholders in the Nigeria Power industry, according to nairametrics.
He claims that the current 4000 MW of electricity generation is unacceptable and there are infrastructure in place to increase it considerably.
He said “4000 megawatts is not acceptable and we have plans to increase the megawatts to a minimum of 6000 to 6500 within the next three to six months.
“What we are looking at is to have an agreement to ramp up to a minimum of 6000 megawatts within the next three to six months.
“I know that the highest we ever generated was 5,700 megawatts about three years ago, that was specifically in Nov. 2021.
“And these 5700 megawatts were also distributed. If we could achieve 5,700 at that time, I believe we still have the infrastructure to generate between 6,000 and 6,500.”
He said the lack of power generation was due to gas supply problems, noting that the capacity to generate 6000 megawatts is available from the power plants he visited.
He noted, “Once there is gas supply, we want to ramp up generation to a minimum of 6,000 megawatts.”
The Minister pointed out that the Ministry of Power and its subordinate agencies have been working round the clock to correct this situation as soon as possible.
He underlined their commitment not to rest until a stable energy supply has been achieved, noting that the meeting had been convened to address the problems in the power sector.
Adelabu noted that the administration of President Bola Tinubu was committed to finding and solving underlying issues in order to guarantee a secure energy supply for consumers.