Power outage: National Grid Restored, says Minister

The Federal Government has said there are other challenges that led to the nationwide power outage apart from the issue of the drop in water level at dams.

The Minister of Power, Engineer Abubakar Aliyu, said this Wednesday while fielding questions from State House reporters after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting presided over by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

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He was reacting to questions on the possible factors responsible for the current deplorable electricity supply situation across the country.

The minister, who said the challenges were already being addressed, stated that the recent collapse of the national grid had been sorted out.

He listed the challenges that contributed to the current power crisis to include the collapse of the grid, scheduled maintenance of facilities, vandalization of pipelines, the disputes around availability of gas as well as payment for gas contracts between gas companies and power generating companies.

“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 a scheduled maintenance and it is supposed to be scheduled outage, but we had not envisaged that we will have issues around vandalization of pipelines, which the NNPC has addressed as you can see evidently 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 around gas. You need to have gas contract between generating companies and gas suppliers- some are form contracts, some are not. We are looking into this and have proffered some solutions in some few days to mature,”he said.

Aliyu also made clarification on the issue of the quantity of generated electricity in the country, saying “we have capacity of 8,000 megawatts – the one on the grid, imbedded 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”.