FG To Add 150 Megawatts Of Electricity Before January – Minister

The Minister of power, Adebayo Adelabu, has disclosed that plans are ongoing for additional 150 megawatts of electricity to the National grid before January 2025.

Adelabu who disclosed this at the Presidential Villa on Wednesday, said the move will lead to relative stability of the National grid.

The Minister who was part of the bilateral meeting between President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his German counterpart, Frank Walter Steinmeier, said the part way to steady power supply is collaboration, partnership and revamping of the entire grid.

He said Nigeria has bilateral relationship with the Republic of Germany in the area of energy and electricity, adding: “What is key now is collaboration and partnership, and the flagship of this bilateral relationship has to do with what we call the Siemens project, which is our presidential power Initiative, where Siemens is actually implementing the Brownfield and Greenfield transmission substations of the Presidential Power initiative.⁣”

According to the Minister, since December 2023 when the agreement was signed “We have completed the pilot phase of this project, up to 80 percent. This involves the importation, the installation and commissioning of 10 power transformers and 10 powermobile substations.

“There have been imported and installed. We have just about two left to be commissioned before the end of the year. ⁣The positive impact of this is that it has added nothing less than 750 megawatts to our transmission grid capacity, which is why the relative stability that we are seeing in the grid today is the direct positive impact of the pilot stage completion. ⁣

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“So, we believe that before end of the year, additional 150 megawatts capacity is going to be added upon completion of the entire pilot phase.⁣ We are officially entering into the phase one stage of this project, which involves rehabilitation of 14 brownfield existing substations and the establishment of 23 new Greenfield stations across the length and breadth of this country. ⁣
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“What we are expecting now is a no-objection approval from the Bureau of Public Procurement, after which I am going to present it at FEC. ⁣Once presented at FEC, and we will finalise the financing arrangement, we are quite confident from the satisfaction that we got from the completion of the pilot stage.

“When we are done with the Phase One project in the transmission, the entire grid will not remain the same, and that’s why we are telling Nigerians that this is a very old grid. It’s quite fragile and it’s dilapidating. ⁣We need to revamp the entire grid for us to be sure of stability going forward.”

Speaking on renewable energy, he said, “We have an energy transition plan to achieve net zero emission by year 2060. To achieve this, we must collaborate. We must partner. We must cooperate with a country like Germany, who have the technology, we have the sun. Over 30 states in Nigeria have minimum of 10 hours of sunshine everyday. ⁣

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“They have technology. We have the wind. We have the desert wind up north, and we have the coastal wind down south. And with the new highway from Lagos to Calabar, it’s opening up our coastal offshore wind across the nine coastal states of Lagos, Ogun, Ondo, Edo, Delta Rivers, Bayelsa, Akwa Ibom and Cross River. We won’t have any choice.”

He also said the solution to the electricity issue is the off-grid system where the “36 states and FCT will have their own generating plants within the state, and this network will be embedded within the states, and they will be shielded from any problem on the national grid. When there is a problem on the national grid, they will all have backup.”