Our reporter/ The revamp of the power framework within Nigeria will take five years more than its earlier scheduled, German engineering company, Siemens Energy has confirmed.
According to the energy company, the delay is due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When we conceptualized this project in 2018, our plan was within two years we should be done with phase one, but then Covid happened,” a Bloomberg report detailed in an interview with the Head of Business Development and Government Relations for Siemens Energy, Oladayo Orolu, on Monday.
“Some raw material components costs have been doubled, some are still close to where they used to be, some are just marginally higher.”
Orolu was optimistic that the electricity output in the country would increase by an additional 2,000 megawatts at the completion of phase one by 2025.
“The objective of phase one is to do quick fix projects that will free up 2,000 megawatts, we currently have 5000, we are looking at taking that to 7,000,” he said.
Former President, Muhammadu Buhari, in collaboration with Siemens, in 2019 unveiled a road map geared towards resolving existing challenges in the power sector and expanding capacity for future power needs in Nigeria.
The project which involved three phases had the objectives to deliver an additional 2GW to the grid, to significantly reduce ATC&C losses, and to achieve improved grid stability and reliability.
Nigeria’s installed generation capacity is currently at ~14GW and its grid network capacity of about half of that is not sufficient to support Nigeria’s ambition of being an industrialised nation.”
With Bloomberg report
Leave a Reply