The Minister of Power, Mr. Chinedu Nebo has said the progress been made by the Federal Government would be a wasted effort except the menace of vandals is effectively tackled.
The Minister lamented that for the vandalisation of electricity installation power supply would have improved more than it is at the moment.
Mr. Nebo who was speaking at the 2013 Ministerial Platform on Tuesday in Abuja noted that government has had to spend more repairing the vandalized equipment.
“Vandalisation is a making a mess of the things we are doing. The vandals gathered momentum sabotaging the entire network that was beginning to generate bulk power. All of a sudden, vandalisation of facilities bounced back to our sector.
If you know the technology that is needed to fix them, you will understand that none of these things take a few days to repair. Several weeks can be lost.
In one of our Discos, vandals attacked it more than 60 times and all they retrieved from the transformers altogether would not be worth more than N10,000 but t took N27million to repair what they took.
The result is that about one million people have been put in darkness because of this. I am pained, we work together to make sure that all these things are in place and when you relax they strike,” he said.
The Minister pointed out that Government will pursue vigorously the restructuring of Ministry of Power and its Agencies and will cope with the evolving role in a privatised environment adding that it would no longer be business as usual.
“We are doing everything to attract Foreign Investments in the Power sector.
“We have rehabilitated six existing Regional Training Centres inherited from PHCN and are also building two new centres in Jos & Kano”
“We have commenced intensive training of 1,000 graduate engineers and trained 70 engineers across the power sector on renewable energy options” Nebo stated.
The Minister disclosed that rehabilitation work presently ongoing include; the repair of the Unit 2 Shiroro power plant which led to recovery of 150MW in 2012 Hydropower Plant, the Jebba Hydro Power Station preventive maintenance of 2G2 in 2012 to ensure availability & sustainability of 96.4MW, the Kainji rehabilitation works on 1G5 & 1G12 Units to recover 220MW capacity by Dec 2014.
Mr. Nebo said that with the replacement of several obsolete parts of Egbin power plant with new ones in 2012, plant reliability has gone up to 70 percent from its previous 60 percent.
He noted that in order to enhance the security of power supply, government is working towards diversifying the country’s fuel mix.
According to him, the nation’s vast resources of coal, wind, solar, biomass and hydropower potentials are being fully exploited.
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