NDPHC Moves to Utilise 3,000MW Unused Power
The Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC) says it is taking steps to ensure 3,000 megawatts of stranded power in its plants becomes utilised.
The company said it is also putting efforts in top gear to ensure the attainment of 4,000MW generation capacity.
NDPHC Managing Director, Chiedu Ugbo, stated this recently at the groundbreaking of the Light Up Agbara project.
At the ceremony held within the premises of Evans Baroque, Ugbo who represented Vice President Kashim Shettima, noted that NDPHC is the catalyst as far as the provision of electricity is concerned in the country.
According to him, the Nigerian government had invested a lot in the NDPHC, but its 4,000MW generation capacity is underutilised.
“The Nigerian federation has invested in us so much to the extent that we have 4,000MW generation capacity built with people’s funds, but it is grossly underutilised due to a number of factors outside NDPHC’s control,” Ugbo stated.
He narrated that despite the huge investment in the power sector, Nigerians were still not getting the deserved benefit.
This, he said, informed why the NDPHC decided to take the lead by coming up with the idea of ‘Light Up Nigeria’, rallying everybody in the industry together.
“For many years, while worrying about what we could do to salvage the situation. I have been working with the Transmission Company of Nigeria and then a few years ago, we started partnering with the Eko Electricity Distribution Company.
“We did a bilateral agreement and then we signed the framework agreement and I insisted that we must go to Agbara, being the industrial cluster in sub-Saharan Africa to salvage the situation. We must provide electricity to industrial areas.
“What the sector needs is the synergy by every stakeholder from gas through generation, through transmission, through distribution to end users. For us, the issue is to seek out the load centres like Agbara. Agbara is a pilot for the Light Up Nigeria Initiative,” he noted.
Ugbo emphasised that the Eko DisCo was brought into the Agbara scheme because it is the owner of the franchise area while NDPHC is a generation company.
‘“For our electricity to be dispatched, there must be demand and it is that demand that we are working on. That demand has to be facilitated by effective electricity transportation and that is why we brought in TCN; that is why we have FGN Power Company to unlock the bottlenecks in the transmission.
“The FGN Power has taken the first step by bringing the mobile transformer to install. We are also working with our distribution contractors who will do the reticulation together with Millwater to the various customers,” he stated.
Speaking on the capacity of NDPHC to make Light Up Nigeria a reality, NDPHC Executive Director, Generation, Kassim Abdulahi, declared that the company has more than enough capacity to meet every obligation of the initiative.
“We have enough available power in all our power plants. We have almost 3,000MW ready to go but we are currently dispatching less than 1,000MW”, he disclosed.
Giving an update on the Light Up Nigeria project, NDPHC Executive Director, Corporate Services, Ms Nkechi Mba, disclosed that aside from Agbara, the company was also working to light up other parts of Nigeria and has so far launched the Light Up South East version with Vice President Shettima leading the charge.
The North East version of the project, she explained, will be launched in Bauchi soon.
Mba urged stakeholders in the Agbara industrial cluster to bear with the delay in completing the project on schedule, explaining that it was due to certain unforeseen circumstances arising from the novelty of the project.
She also commended FGN Power Company for generously providing the mobile transformer that was inaugurated.
“We are at this stage today because the Chairman of our Board, Vice President Kashim Shettima, is bringing his influence to bear on this Initiative. Agbara will soon be replicated across Nigeria. After Bauchi and Kano, we plan to be in Port Harcourt,” she disclosed.
