Nigeria’s power sector is reportedly losing about N2 billion daily owing to the renewed spate of bombings by militants in the Niger Delta area.
According to a report by Punch, electricity supply statistics show that the number of functional gas-fired power generating turbines across the country has dropped from 50 that were operational in April to about 30 as of the end of last week.
It would be recalled that in April 2016, the minister of power works and housing, Babatunde Fashola has revealed that out of the 140 power generating turbines in the country, only 50 were functional, adding that the facilities were not working because there was no gas to fire them up.
He was quoted as saying: “The power being generated comes from only about 78 turbines out of 140, and they are largely fired by gas. Now, power has gone down because we have gas outage due to the failure of pipelines. And as a result of that, 78 turbines dropped to may be about 50 because there was no gas.”
Fashola’s submission was confirmed in the latest data obtained on Monday, May 30, 2016 which revealed that the country lost 3,748 megawatts of electricity due to gas constraints on Saturday, May 28, 2016.
It further revealed that Nigeria could not generate 92MW and 127MW of electricity due to line and water management constraints, respectively, while only 2,461MW hour of energy was sent out.
A portion of the report read “The power sector lost the equivalent of N1.904bn on May 28, 2016 due to constraints.”
On Friday, May 27, 2016, the power sector lost N2.117 billion owing to the failure to generate 3,849MW of electricity with only 2,163MwH of power was sent out to consumers across the country.
Statistics from the System Operator of the Transmission Company of Nigeria also showed that the country’s power generation fluctuated between 2,300MW and 3,000MW for several weeks, but this fell drastically to 2,020.1MW on Saturday, May 28, 2016.
