National Grid Restored As FG Explains Why Nigerians Have Been Having Poor Power Supply

The federal government has told Nigerians that there are various issues responsible for the epileptic power supply been witnessed in the country.

Speaking on Wednesday after the weekly Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting, the Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu explained that scheduled maintenance of facilities, vandalization of pipelines as well as the disputes around the availability of gas and payment for gas contracts between gas companies and power generating companies are some of the factors responsible for the nationwide poor power supply.

He however told the journalists that the issues are receiving attention.

Particularly, Aliyu disclosed that the national power grid that collapsed twice in 24 hours has been restored.

In his words, “The more reason we are facing the situation now is as a result of the shortage of gas and some of the generators have to go to maintenance.

“It is a scheduled maintenance and it is supposed to be scheduled outage, but we had not envisaged that we will have issues around vandalisation of pipelines, which the NNPC has addressed as you can see evidence everywhere, aviation fuel, and petrol in the filling stations.

“It is a combination of many factors that compounded the problem we are having on the grid.

“We have recovered the grid now. The grid is back and we are trying to get more megawatts to push on the grid. We have set up small committees all geared towards getting more megawatts to put on the grid. Basically, the problem around gas.

“You need to have gas contract between generating companies and gas suppliers- some are form contracts, some are not. We are looking into this and have proffered some solutions in some few days to mature,” he said.

The Minister added that very soon, all the challenges will be solved.

“We have capacity of 8,000 megawatts – the one on the grid, imbedded and captive. If you combine all of them, you will get these problems that we are encountering. We are on top of the challenge and very soon, we will come out of it,” he added.