He said, “There are certain things that need to be put in place for us to have grid stability and one of them is that we need to put in adequate investment. One of the key investments that we need to do quickly is that we need to build another line between Benin and Omotosho.”
Fashola said, “We closed here last week and we are resuming this week with this committee. Committees of the House also will be asking us of our budget performance and we just need to work in the office so that we can also perform. So, I think there’s a sense here that I respectfully ask you to sufficiently use this time so we can also work to serve the Nigerian people.”
The fire incident caused a national grid failure recorded on January 2nd, 2018. Although the fire incident has been handled and normalcy restored, the country’s generation figures has still not sufficiently risen to the range of what was experienced during December 2017.
Fashola informed the president that going ahead with the concession would affect the stability, optimization and continued expansion of the national grid, which, in turn, will affect communication in the country generally.
The report noted that the average power sent out by the Electricity Generating Companies on January 14 stood at 3, 851.06mw, down by 168.58mw recorded the previous day, adding that the peak generation averaged 4,425mw, down by 5.5 percent.
He said, “This is expected to significantly increase the wheeling capacity of the national grid (between 2,000MW to 3,000MW). TCN is already in discussion with World Bank to use the balance under Nigeria Electricity and Gas Improvement Project (NEGIP) to procure the conductors.”
He said, “We are also putting together a policy position to help expand the distribution network of the Discos and use this to distribute the 2000MW that is currently available but cannot be distributed.”
From the statistics, 190 people were victims of 146 electrical accidents throughout the whole year in 2017 in which 113 people died in 95 accidents while 77 others sustained injuries in another 51 accidents.
Nigeria’s electricity grid shut down several times last year, underscoring the instability of the country’s creaking power infrastructure.
Ewesor said, “The exercise will identify high risk defective networks that pose serious threat and danger to operators’ operational staff and the general public for immediate attention and correction/rectification by respective Discos and the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN).
