In Nine Months, Power Sector Loses N472bn
The Nigerian electricity supply industry lost a sum of N472.23bn between January and September this year, according to reports put together by the Advisory Power Team in the Office of the Vice President.
The daily reports of the power sector performance show that the industry loses between N1.5bn and N2bn every day.
It was also observed from the documents obtained in Abuja on Wednesday that the daily losses had persisted since the beginning of 2019.
An analysis of randomly selected daily reports showed that the losses were caused by constraints such as insufficient gas supply, distribution problems, transmission hiccups and water reserves issue.
The APT stated that from January 2019 to 11.51pm on September 10, the sector recorded a revenue loss of N472.23bn, while a total of 3,236 megawatts-hour/hour of energy was constrained during the period.
It put the peak power generation achieved on the national grid during the review period at 5,375MW.
Further findings from randomly selected days showed that on February 19 this year, the sector lost about N1.5bn.
The estimated cumulative amount lost to insufficient gas supply, distribution, transmission and water reserves issues from January 1 to February 19, 2019 was put at N69.1bn.
Also on February 25, the sector lost about N2.13bn, while its losses climbed to N80.2bn when calculated from January to February 25, 2019.
The losses continued in March, April, May, June, July, August and September 2019. On August 16 and September 29, the sector lost N1.91bn and N1.8bn, respectively.
Although the updated report of the APT did not include the losses for parts of September and October 2019, findings by our correspondent showed that huge funds were still being lost by the industry daily.
On October 5, for instance, the sector lost N2.25bn, while it could not also make N2.3bn on October 6, based on data obtained from the Vice-President’s office.
The daily losses in the sector had been taking a negative toll on the fortunes of operators in the Nigerian power business.
Power generation companies recently complained of the liquidity crisis in the sector as they noted that the indebtedness to Gencos alone by NESI was about N1tn.
