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The price Nigerians must pay, by Fashola ON APRIL 24, 20169:03
Babatunde RAJI Fashola, SAN, responds to these Frequently Asked Questions about the Nigerian Power Sector.
Fashola, the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, explains that there is a price to pay to have improved electricity supply.
Question: What are the components required for generating electricity?
Response: Perhaps the place to start is to say that the whole purpose of this discussion is to simplify what appears to have become a very complex issue. And first to say that, Electricity is not different from what you and l learnt in our Physics in schools; Energy resulting in alternating current and all of the technical processes. But to say that if you remember the Principle of the Dynamo and the magnetic fields and all of that, that is really what it is all about. Simply put, the power plants that we have are nothing but very big generators. Power plants are just multiples of the small generators we use at home and just as the generators use fuel, petrol or diesel, the big power plants also use fuel. The fuel sometimes is gas, sometimes it is water where you have hydro-plant, sometimes it is coal. So we just need to understand that we are dealing with big generators, there is no mystery about it. Let me also say that our energy supply is also behind the growth of our population. Today, in March 2016, we have just about 5,000 MW of power on the National Grid for about 180 million people. Now, we have been producing power since 1960 or thereabout, the old Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN), the predecessor of the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) and the Power Holding of Nigeria (PHCN), was created by a 1950 Ordinance and it started operations in 1951, probably over 60 years and from that time the cumulative power we have generated is 5,000 MW and we got to that a few weeks ago this year. So if you do a breakdown of about 66 years you look at averagely about 75 MW of power per year. And when you look at how our population has exploded between 1950, when it was about 37 million, even then corporate Nigeria as known today had not evolved, the Northern and Southern Protectorate, by 1962, l think we were about 47 million and now we are 180 million. So part of the problem we have to deal with is how to equitably and sufficiently distribute what is not enough; clearly not enough. But again possibly, and I believe, can increase in geometric proportions if we all do the right things. One year ago, the holy grail for Power was 4000MW. That was what they were chasing, but less than a year later, we are at 5,000MW. So, if we now do the right things, we won’t have the outages that we have and instead of fixing and trying to stay at 5,000MW, we should be moving on to 6,000, 7,000. And probably be moving in leaps of 2,000MW and I think that is where we should start really, to just understand that background that there is nothing esoteric about it. It is more about how much we want it and how much price it is going to take from us in terms of our behaviour, in terms of our restraints, in terms of our sacrifice that determines how much more of it we can get.....
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