Nigerians may begin to enjoy more hours of power supply daily in the next few months as the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC, chairman, Sam Amadi, on Tuesday said that it will strive to increase its current 5,000 megawatts of electricity generation to 6,000 by December.
Amadi, who made this promise at a two-day workshop organized for stakeholders in the sector, said the commission was determined to ensure that generation and transmission companies improved on their services by providing adequate power supply to Nigerians across the nation.
He said the workshop was principally aimed at brainstorming on how the increased power supply can be achieved seamlessly.
He added that the essence of the workshop was to ensure that stakeholders in the industry reinforced their technical capacity on the grid in order to accommodate more energy.
“We saw in June how generation capacity went as low as 2,000mw, but later went up to 4,700 mw. We set a bench mark of at least 5000 mw but today we are at 5,000 mw or more hoping to reach 6,000 mw before December,’’ he said.
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He said that though the transmission and generation companies faced operational challenges, they could still achieve maximum success in their plans of improving power supply to the people.
Amadi identified poor budgeting, poor project management, and bad procurement strategies as some of the ills affecting the power supply management.
“For instance, if TCN proposed a budget of N50 billion but government approved N30 billion and releases only N10 billion it will stall the implementation of projects in the sector. There is nowhere in the world where projects can be completed with this type of budget provision,’’ he said.