The Minister of Power; Professor Chinedu Nebo has attributed the drastic drop in nation’s power supply to on-going routine maintenance activities which often result in the need to shut down power plants.
He noted that the problem is not a system collapse as it’s being insinuated in some quarters.
Reports emerged on Tuesday that there’s been a significant drop in power generation from a peak of 4,517 MegaWatts (MW) attained on December 21, 2012 to 3,443MW on Tuesday. The loss of 1,112 megawatts in power generation was reported to be due to low gas supply to thermal power plants.
Addressing a news conference in Abuja, Professor Nebo said power transmission infrastructure is also being strengthened and that the power generation will peak again by Thursday.
Explaining what led to the drastic fall, the Minister stated that “a few days ago, precisely last week Friday, Chevron shut down its gas plant for maintenance purposes which was to take place between Friday and Saturday. And the technical crew in the power sector knew about the shut down and this was in order to make sure that damages are not done before losing the gas entirely.”
“From time to time there is going to be shut down and it happened two times recently between Benin and Osogbo. If you don’t shutdown these plants, in order to have a safe restarting process, you are going to lose the equipment. Once routine maintenance is done, the process of restarting the machines that were shutdown take some time.”
He said two power stations were affected by the recent shutdown, stressing that the oil company and the ministry’s technicians had to maintain the plants.
“That is why between two and three days we lost some 1112MW. That means Omotoso and Olorunsogo plants were forced to shut down because there was no gas supply. By design, Chevron has to maintain the gas pipelines and it was so. You will notice that from Monday we started seeing some increase that has stabilised” he added.
He further noted that more power plants are lined up for commissioning within the year, adding that this is also expected to boost generation.
