*Babatunde Raji Fashola, Nigeria’s minister of Power.
27 April 2016, Abuja — The Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr. Babatunde Fashola, said on Tuesday that only 50 of Nigeria’s 140 power generating turbines are currently working and generating electricity because there is no gas to power some of them that use gas.
Fashola spoke on Tuesday on a Channels Television Talkshow, Sunrise, which was monitored in Abuja.
He stated that even though the country has 140 power turbines installed in its electricity system, the majority of them are gas fired.
He said before now, 78 of the turbines were generating power but the number went down to 50 as gas supply to most of them continued to drop.
“The first problem is that there is not enough power. Today we have 25 power plants. Three, Shiroro, Jebba, Kainji, are hydro plants while the rest are gas-fired plants.
“We have an installed capacity of about 12,000 megawatts. Also, we have about 140 turbines installed, but available capacity is about 8,000MW,” he said.
He further said: “Now the power being generated comes from only about 78 turbines out of 140 and they are largely fired by gas.
“Now that power has gone down because we had the gas outage due to the failure of a pipeline. And as a result of that, 78 turbines dropped to maybe about 50 because there was no gas.”
The minister, however, noted that the current challenges affecting power production in the country can be resolved, adding that the ministry of petroleum resources has agreed to provide more gas for power generation.
*Chineme Okafor – Thisday
