President Muhammadu Buhari said that his administration is addressing the issue of power outages witnessed recently in various parts of Nigeria.
The President spoke about the power outages while apologizing for the inconvenience caused by the prolonged shortage of petroleum products.
President Buhari made this known via a statement on Wednesday by Garba Shehu, his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity.
“The blackouts seen in the national grid are also being addressed,” he assured Nigerians. “A dip in hydroelectric generation due to seasonal pressures has coincided with technical and supply problems at thermal stations.
“On this, the government is also working tirelessly to resolve the issues at the latter to guarantee sufficient power flows into the national grid.”
As part of emergency measures put in place following a meeting convened with key stakeholders to address the low power generation in the country, the President said the main challenge was identified as being one of low gas power generation, as a result of sabotage of gas pipelines leading to the shutdown of power plants coupled with routine maintenance on other gas power plants.
To recover over 1000MW, he said actions were agreed upon between the players in the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI) and NNPC.
According to President Buhari, the actions targeted the National Integrated Power Project (NIPP) plants, Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC), and power plants run under NNPC Joint Ventures, Agip and Shell (NAOC and SPDC).
He explained that progress on the key actions has already ensured the restoration of 375MW to the grid after the pipeline from “Okpai 1” was repaired.
To also ramp up the underutilised capacity of the NDPHC capacity, he said a $50 million gas supply agreement was being finalised to secure the sustainability of up to 800MW of underutilised NIPP assets.
The President assured Nigerians that the government’s attention to these problems would bear fruits very soon.
