The Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr.
Babatunde Fashola, on Thursday stated that it was wrong to assume that investors in
electricity systems were leaving Nigeria, adding that on the contrary, the
appetite for investments in the country’s power sector is still high.
According to him, “This morning, somebody said all
the investors are leaving Nigeria. But please play the speech of the Japanese
Ambassador, Sadanobu Kusaoke, to this person that not only have they (JICA)
completed these projects, they are undertaking another one in Lagos and they
are going to do more.
“If there was one sector in the Nigerian economy
that investment appetite is high, it is the power sector, and the potential
that it has is very high. I couldn’t say more eloquently than the way Kusaoke
has put it.”
On the 60MVAR power capacitor bank, he noted that
the facility would help improve the voltage of electricity supplied to selected
locations across the country.
The minister also explained that a second power
capacitor bank which would serve other locations would be located in Keffi, Nassarawa
State, and will be handed over to the federal government by JICA in June this
year.
He said: "We are here because we promised
incremental power and to make it better. Not only have we improved the quantity
of power that is available, we have also improved the quality of power that is
transported and distributed.
“It is one thing to have power and another to have good
quality of the power. And today, we have come to address the quality of power.”
Continuing, Fashola explained: “Some of the
examples of improving services will be the roll out of projects that will help
bring more people access to power. Our population has grown over the last 20
years without commensurate expansion in the services, and that is partly why
there is load shedding and low voltage."
Similarly, the Chief Representative of JICA,
Nigeria Office, Katsutoshi Komori, described the projects as “emergency
improvement facilities."
Komori added that improving core infrastructure in
the power sector was one of the priority areas of the agency’s programmes in
Nigeria.
He said: “It is my pleasure to be here today to
celebrate the inauguration and handover of ‘the project for emergency
improvement of electricity supply facilities in Abuja.’ In Nigeria, the high
ratio of reactive power, together with insufficient capacity of facilities,
interferes with the quality of electricity supply.
“For instance, areas like the Federal Capital
Territory (FCT) and Nasarawa State have particularly high population growth
rate and are some distance away from power generation facilities, consequently,
suffer from voltage drops and power loss. To address this challenge, JICA
provided a grant for the procurement and installation of power capacitor and
related equipment at Apo and Keffi substations.”
In his remarks, the Managing Director of the TCN,
Mr. Usman Mohammed, said the 60MVAR power capacitor bank situated in the Apo
transmission substation was necessitated by the ongoing transmission rehabilitation
and reinforcement of power infrastructure in Nigeria by the TCN to improve its
wheeling capacity at the interface level with electricity distribution
companies.
Usman explained that the facility would improve the
voltage of the power supply in Abuja, Nasarawa and Benue States.
It was also learnt that the grant agreement for the
Apo and Keffi power capacitor bank projects was signed between the Federal
Ministry of Budget and National Planning and JICA, with the Federal Ministry of
Power, Works and Housing as a witness on February 11, 2016, while the contract
was awarded to an EPC contractor in July 2016 at the cost of $12.1 million.
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