President Bola Tinubu Friday flagged off the Gwagwalada Independent Power Plant (GIPP) project of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited.
The president did the groundbreaking ceremony in Abuja at an event attended by the Group Chief Executive Officer of the NNPC Limited, Mele Kyari; the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, Gabriel Aduda and his counterpart in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Olusade Adesola, among other top dignitaries in the private and public sectors of the economy.
Tinubu described the event as an important tool of the country’s infrastructure, noting that the project is very necessary and commendable for the economic growth of the country.
He said Nigeria would not become a productive economy unless it became efficient in stable power supply.
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He promised to remove every obstacle hindering the growth and development of the power sector, particularly in the area of transmission and distribution networks.
He said, “The groundbreaking is highly significant to the country as it marks the first bold step in the administration’s concerted efforts to establish a strong viral energy sector that will drive the economy. Energy is the most important discovery for humanity in the last 1,000 years. There is no life without power, so we need energy.
“During my campaign, I committed to Nigerians and promised to make the provision of stable electricity a priority of this governance – to use all available energy sources to increase power generation beyond the current power capacity of just 12,000 megawatts, to strengthen the integrity of our transmission infrastructure, and to ensure that all distribution bottlenecks will be removed.
“We cannot become a productive economy unless we become efficient. Nigeria cannot become a productive and industrialized economy, we cannot tackle poverty and create thousands of jobs, highly paying manufacturing jobs unless we can generate and transmit reliable electricity.”
The Gwagwalada Independent Power Plant project is a 1.350MW Combined Cycle Power Plant with auxiliaries and Balance of Plant to be situated on 547 hectares of land already acquired at Gwagwalada in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja.
The project is expected to generate between $700m and $800m annually within the first 10 years of operation.
The GIPP was necessitated by the need to deliver gas towards additional power generation capacity in Nigeria. Gas supply to the plant shall be through the Ajaokuta- Kaduna-Kano (AKK) gas pipeline project, which is currently at its advanced stage of construction.
On completion, the GIPP project will generate an average of 10.3million megawatt hour (MWh) of electricity per year for sale to the Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Plc (NBET).
Kyari, on his part, said the focus of the president in ensuring energy sufficiency and security in the country would create prosperity and bountiful harvest for Nigerians.
He said the NNPCL saw the GIPP project as an opportunity to monetise the abundant natural gas resources by expanding access to energy, support economic growth, industrialisation and job creation across the country.
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