Kazeem Owoseni
The Minister of Power, Bayo Adelabu, has revealed the plans by the Federal Government to generate 20,000 megawatts of electricity in Nigeria, by 2026 and 60,000MW by 2060.
Adelabu who disclosed this during his visit to the National Control Centre of the Transmission Company of Nigeria in Osogbo, Osun capital on Friday, highlighted the short and long term plans of the ministry towards increasing power generation, transmission and distribution in the country.
According to him, since the government has set the target within a time frame, it is achievable, considering the countries that have achieved more within the same time frame.
“Like I told you, it’s an aspiration for Nigeria to have a minimum of 60,000 megawatts of power by 2060; that is 60 gigawatts. And 2030 is the medium-term objective of achieving 30,000 megawatts of power.
“But as I mentioned in one of the programmes I attended, in as much as we are on course in achieving this, given the experiences of other countries who are even able to achieve over 100,000 megawatts within 40 to 50 years, this is not an ambitious target for Nigeria, we can easily achieve it.
“We have a target for transmission capacity, we have a target for distribution capacity and we have a target for power generation capacity. By 2026, we should be able to achieve 20,000 megawatts of electricity,” Adelabu said.
The Minister however added that two more power substations would come up in the next few months, courtesy of the presidential power initiative of the Federal Government.
He warned that any employee found sabotaging the efforts of the government in the power sector would be punished accordingly by the government.
Adelabu however assured that a panel has been set up to investigate the cause of the fire incident at the power substation of the TCN in Birnin Kebbi, recently.
