Power producers in the Republic of Nigeria lost at least N1.632 trillion (US$3,939,269,539.20) between 2015 and 2021 over the lack of full evacuation of generated electricity on the national grid causing stranded power of 27,204 Megawatts (MW).
According to the Daily Trust report, data from the Association of Power Generation Companies (APGC) showed that about 25 active GenCos had over 15,000 megawatts (MW) of stranded generation capacity at the end of 2021.
Given the breakdown of the figure, Daily Trust noted that the GenCos had 63,339.02MW of available power generation within the seven years, however, just 32,778.98MW of power was generated and evacuated through the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) network to the Distribution Companies (DisCos) network for supply to consumers.
This means there was a balance of 27,204.5MW, representing about 30 per cent of available capacity which was stranded during the seven years.
This stranded power translated to N1.632 trillion market losses during the period, the data showed.
The analysis of the data on yearly revenue losses showed that from 2015 to 2021, the highest loss of N273.32 billion was recorded in 2016 when the GenCos could not deliver 3,828MW to the grid even when it had 7,040MW capacity.
The second highest stranded power was recorded in 2020 when the GenCos recorded a N266.1 billion loss over 3,742MW stranded power from an overall 7,793MW generation capacity.
In 2018, N264 billion was lost due to 3,699MW stranded power; the power generation companies then lost N256.9 billion in 2019 when they could not get 3,599MW of electricity to the consumers due to transmission and distribution network challenges.
Another N236.4 billion was lost in 2017 as the GenCos recorded 3,312MW stranded power while 3,010MW stranded electricity caused a loss of N214.9 billion in 2015.
The least of the stranded power and its losses were recorded just in 2021 when 2,248.5MW could not be delivered to the grid due to the grid hiccups causing a loss of N120.2 billion, which is about half of the revenue lost in each of the previous six years.
Commenting on the weak transmission and distribution network, a power sector expert, Dr Joy Ogaji, in an outlook report for this year, held that: “Reliability has been discovered to be a function of infrastructure and proper metering guarantees accurate billing. While some stakeholders have opined that the illiquid state of the NESI is the core challenge, we believe the liquidity crisis is not the problem, but a key symptom of the problem and can be solved.
“Hence, we expect an increased focus on the provision of required infrastructure as well as ensuring infrastructural handshake between the TransCo (TCN) and the DisCos,” she noted.
Source: https://energynewsafrica.com
