Nigeria's Power supply drops to 2,880MW

Proff Nebo

 Power supply from the national grid to households and businesses in the country tumbled below 3,000 megawatts on Tuesday, almost a month after it dropped to 2,954.52MW before rebounding.

Power generation fell to 2,948.45MW on Tuesday, while 2,880.31MW was sent out, according to data obtained from the Presidential Task Force on Power on Wednesday.

The downturn in power generation was attributed to the sabotage of the Trans Forcados Pipeline on Sunday, January 4, 2015.

Power generation on the day fell to 3,415.21MW, while 3,314.99MW was sent out, according to the Federal Ministry of Power.

The quantum of electricity available for distribution to various classes of consumers as of December 29, 2014 was 4,112.29MW out of the 4,389.7MW generated, but this fell to 3,415.21MW on Sunday, according to the ministry.

The Special Adviser on Gas to the Minister of Power, Mr. Frank Edozie, in a telephone interview with our correspondent, said, “The reason power supply is down is that there is not enough gas and the reason there is not enough gas is because of sabotage of gas pipelines.

“The pipelines have been regularly vandalised in the last few months. The Trans Forcados Pipeline has been down. The last incident occurred on Sunday. The previous one was last Wednesday. The pipeline was fixed and as it was about to be commissioned, it was vandalised again at various points.”

The country achieved the highest peak generation of 4,517.6 MW of electricity on December 23, 2012.

Respondents in the latest governance poll conducted by NOIPolls for the month of December 2014 rated President Goodluck Jonathan poorly in terms of power supply.