The Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI) has announced that the country’s power sector is losing an average of N549 billion yearly to gas supply challenges. It stated that the situation has continued to deprive the country of over 2,479 Mega Watts (MW) daily.
NESI said the sector is losing an estimated N1.525 billion daily due to power generation constraints. Further analysis showed that losing N1.525 billion daily to lack of gas to power plants, translated to N45.75 billion monthly.
NESI said, in its daily power generation analysis, that the country recorded line constraint of 394.5MW and high-frequency constraints of 303MW as at October 12, 2016. It explained that the revenue losses were calculated using a net, average and levelised tariff of N20/kWh.
The agency emphasised that in gross terms, this implies average end-user tariffs of circa N32/kWh inclusive of all Aggregate Technical and Commercial losses (ATC&C) and export sales if one adopts the assumptions contained in MYTO 2.1.
NESI, which noted that 85 per cent of the combined installed capacity of power plants in Nigeria was fuelled by gas, added that “availability of gas molecules is low due to insufficient production, economic disincentives, inadequate infrastructure and frequent vandalism.”
Corroborating NESI, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) stated that gas supply dropped from the 619 mmscfd in August 2015 to 405 mmscfd in July this year to generate an average power of about 1,911mw compared with 2,694mw generated in the same period of the previous year.
Specifically, power generation from gas-fired plants has been dropping steadily from 3,472mw in August 2015 to 2,017mw in May 2016 and to 1,911mw in July 2016.
