The Minster of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, has expressed confidence that the nation can generate 12,000 megawatts of electricity, once the glitches in the power sector are addressed.
Fashola, who said this at the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, Forum in Abuja on Wednesday, May 18, stated that despite the challenges, the nation’s power sector still had the ability to advance its power generation, transmission and distribution through other sources.
“There are many perspectives to do this; we have today the capacity to generate at least 12,000 megawatts. If we fix all what is not working; let us even say that we are not building any new power plant, anything close to 12,000, we can do.”
“But we won’t do it because out of over one hundred and forty turbines, only about half can get gas.”
He explained that the nation’s power generating capacity had reached 5,000 megawatts before the recent vandalism of gas pipelines.
“The only reason I announced 5,000 this year that we have reached this bus-stop; because I was already heading to another bus-top, until we had the outages and blow up at the Chevron platform.
“Just as we were hoping that will soon be completed and we will get back on, that took us back to 3000.
“Then we were looking at ways to bypass and evacuate our condensates, so that we can get more gas, we had reached about 3,800.
“Then they hit again the Chevron pipeline in Escravos, the oil platform and also now the gas pipeline, the Excravos Lagos pipeline system, deliberate sabotage, took us down to 2,500 megawatts.”
