TheCable

Babatunde Fashola, minister of power, works and housing, says the insufficient availability of gas has made it difficult to fuel power plants, hence the erratic supply of electricity to Nigerians.

Fashola said gas suppliers haven’t been “fully paid” as a result of liquidity problems and also noted that pipeline sabotage by Niger Delta militants had greatly affected power output.

The minister made this known on Wednesday while speaking to state house reporters after the federal executive council meeting.

He said: “We heard there was liquidity problems, gas suppliers haven’t been fully paid, you have back and forth between DisCos and GenCos so those are the issues. Apart from the sabotage that we have had from the Western axis of the Niger Delta, so the Escravos Lagos pipeline is not operational, the Forcados export terminal too has been out of operation.

“So, if you can’t produce oil, you can’t take the gas. The gas is the fuel that the power plants need. You have seen what we have been doing in increasing the capacity in firing transmission but if we don’t have fuel to fire the plants, that is the reason.

“What then happens on the grid is that once it goes below 3,000 MW, it becomes unstable. It is like in your house when you have surges and your circuit breakers trip to protect the system. So once it falls below a certain threshold you then have those trip offs. There are in a sense almost necessity to protect the entire system, so what then happens is startups, we do black starts from various power plants.

“While we were trying to start last week we had a fire in Afam and that affected the control room and these are normal engineering accidents that can happen, the mechanical parts can break down, we also had another fire in Kainji. We have tried to repair them over the last weekend while negotiations with the gas companies are ongoing.

The minister further stated that power supply is back to 2,900 megawatts and also expressed hope that incremental power will be achieved.

“I have been meeting with the gas suppliers, trying to see how we can pay off some of these debts whilst fix other problems. As I continue to say, it is not technical but financial, vandalism of pipelines is not technical, people are destroying, they are hungry.

“Until we resolve these behavorial issues, people collect money, are they remitting everything in a manner that is fair, even if it is not enough, some people hold up their own share and they ask themselves why should we continue to supply if we can’t get paid because there are bankers and financiers?

“So we are talking with everybody, trying to resolve it. As at yesterday, we were back to 2900, so we are building up back again and very soon you will see some stability. These are setbacks on the road to incremental power but we will overcome them.”