How We Veered off Power Generation Targets: Nebo

Chinedu Nebo 

Immediate past Minister of Power, Prof. Chinedu Nebo told Chineme Okafor in this interview that the power generation targets of the Jonathan administration could not be actualised because oil companies failed to fulfil their domestic gas supply obligations. Excerpts.  

Your stewardship is up now, what records are you leaving behind?

It is very important that we look at the scorecard because I had been minister of power for two years and three months, but looking back it hadn’t been a bed of roses and even if it where, when it had roses, it had thorns and in fact sometimes we saw more thorns than the roses.

We are however grateful to God that the power sector has really come a long way with the privatisation of the power sector through the electric power sector reform Act which set the ball rolling.

I think one of the most significant thing the past government had done was to privatise the power sector because before the administration of President Jonathan, the power sector was neglected, ignored and totally underfunded.

The sector’s equipment were allowed to dilapidate, it was a nightmare and any little problem somewhere affected the entire nation because the grid was unreliable and very unstable. We didn’t actually have a national grid until President Jonathan came.

It is now that we can say we have a national grid with the loop closed to make it really national and not just all kinds of system that you couldn’t really call national. Today, instead of that radial structure, we have a grid that is more stable and reliable as well as a power sector that is ready to solve the power problems in Nigeria.

In specifics, what are some of the discerning marks of the past regime in the sector?

Before President Jonathan, the transmission infrastructure was in shambles and for 16 full years, there was no hiring of a single engineer or technical expert within the entire power sector as run by the government.

If you lose half a generation of experts in a system, it is not possible to call that system one that could stand the test of time because what we had was a very local meander-like power regime with aging engineers that nobody replaced.

There were empty stores and repairs shops. This situation allowed the human capacity development to become dysfunctional and die completely.

Thankfully, a lot of funding had been injected into the transmission system. The grid is being strengthened and for the first time we were able to hit a peak of over 100,000 megawatt hours in a day.

We had less collapses of the grid and this has become less prominent because we used to have system collapses all the time but it is now minimised.

I also regard the NIPP projects as a huge benefit to this country. It was not President Jonathan that started it because it started under President Obasanjo and was left to fizzle out until Jonathan came on board and energised it by getting all the three arms of government to continue and participate in the completion of these 10 plants.

In fact, the NIPP projects are contributing more than the legacy PHCN power plants to the national grid today and I will say that the administration did phenomenally well even though a few of the NIPP plants are still undergoing completion.

The completion of privatisation of the distribution assets was wonderful because the entire process was adjudged very transparent by global referees.

There are still pockets of challenges in the sector, were they overlooked?

No, since the privatisation, the private sector has injected so much more to revamp the ailing turbines much more than government could have found the money to do and today we have a good number of them adding more capacities to their existing ones, while repairs and revamp continues.

The greatest undoing of this administration and my greatest regret however is that we lost the war against vandalism and that of inadequate gas supply. These turbines are ready to go but some of them are operating at 30 per cent capacity.

In a place where you have three turbines, only one of them is at work because there is no gas supply and I think I feel so sad about this because if we had gas going to the turbines, every Nigerian would have been hailing President Jonathan today but unfortunately there was no gas.

When gas was produced even more, you find a preference by gas producers to give gas to the industries instead of the power sector and this happens up till today because whereas the profile for gas to power continues to decrease, the profile for gas to the industries continue to increase.

What went wrong on this despite reported commitments on stable gas supply?

Something is wrong and I think the incoming government should take a cue and make sure that gas producers like the NNPC does what it ought to do, otherwise, it will be difficult for the country to continue on this. I do hope that the next administration will be able to fight vandalism and bring vandals to their knees.

We had pipelines blown up every two weeks while repairs take another two weeks. It got to a point that the integrity of the pipelines became compromised and a lot of major work had to be done while it costs so much money to repair the pipelines.

It is a loss to the whole country that there is no gas and we had very little gas going to the power sector.

I think it would be a sure winner if the incoming administration does something to make sure that all these turbines find gas to power them because I think it is scandalous that we produce over 5 billion standard cubic feet (bscf) of gas every day but sell 4bscf and retain only one billion for local consumption.

And within that one billion, the gas producers starve the power sector of needed gas to industrialise this country and I think that is a shame.

So, with gas fixed, Nigeria could quickly see tangible changes in the situation?

Yes, if there is gas, it shouldn’t take long when every Nigerian will know that a lot has happened in the power sector.

With regards to distribution, privatisation of course has helped and Discos are now under the private sector. While two or more are doing extremely well, some others are average in their performance but I think that government should continue to create an enabling environment for them to thrive because one thing that consumers need is power and if we have enough gas and able to generate enough power, the consumer will not only get electricity but reduced tariff because the more electricity we produce, the lower the tariff that consumers will have to pay and Discos cannot even make money unless they get power from the generation companies.

The Discos are suffering because there is no power and many of them do not get enough money to stay afloat.

What role has the non-passage of the PIB played here?

Sometimes, I do think that it should have been better to extract the gas aspect of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) and treated separately because I believe it will incentivise gas producers to produce more gas.

The government has actually recently started looking at inland gas deposits, marginal field gas all over the place and even some of the coal deposits that have gas associated with them have got the attention of the federal government and if the PIB had been passed it would have helped a lot in liberalising the market and production of more gas.

I also think that the reason we are suffering so much is that we refuse to think outside the box like actually using liquefied natural gas even though it is more expensive. But the good thing is that it reduces the volume much more than compressed gas. We can build power plants at points of delivery with a regasification plant so that we use liquefied natural gas and not depend on the mercy of vandals.

What about embedded generation, talks about it seems to have started lately?

The best, quickest and most inexpensive way of giving Nigerians adequate power will be embedded generation or distributed power. If we have embedded generation of 10 to 20 megawatts across clusters of end-users, we can have more power produced in one year than it will take to build a mega power plant of over 500 megawatts capacity which will take years to complete.

In one year, if we are able to build small capacity power plants of 50 megawatts, we can have up to 20 comfortably without all the financial and technical delays in their development. With embedded generation, we can give Nigerians up to 2000 megawatts of distributed power every year until we get to our target and we can do that because we don’t need to put them in the national grid but sell to Discos and industrial clusters across the country.

Another way is utilisation of renewable energy and I will advise the incoming government to promote renewable energy especially solar which has huge capacity to give Nigeria more power.

We are not doing solar in this country and that was why under President Jonathan, we were able to demonstrate that it can work in three communities using solar. The next administration should think about energy efficiency because we now have the policy as approved by the federal executive council.

Energy efficiency is also garnering new talks, how should this be treated?

Almost all the bulbs we have in Nigeria encourage energy waste whereas if we use Light Emitting Diodes bulbs, we can save 75 to 80 per cent of the energy that other bulbs could consume. There are other energy saving appliances that we can encourage Nigerians to use often because for every energy we save, we create more energy. If we are LEDify all the lighting points in Nigeria, we could be saving up to 1000 megawatts and if you cost what it takes to build a power plant of that capacity is about $2 billion. I believe that this incoming administration can gloriously surprise Nigerians by giving Nigerians power within a few months if they solve the gas problem because the infrastructure is available and it is possible because it needs a lot of political will.

Once more, what efforts did you put in for embedded generation?

Very frankly, we had encouraged the Discos to go further in procuring embedded power generation and we are happy that a few of them have taken up that challenge to advertise for people to take up such opportunities with them. We can as well take this to industries because they need it more. For instance, every steel industry in Nigeria consumes a large amount of electricity and once they come on, they take so much power from the grid to cause momentary instability that will make it very important to give them embedded power generation so that they can have it dedicated to them. The nearest transmission line to the rice mill that President Jonathan commissioned in Nasarawa was about 50 kilometres and they spend about 12,000 litres of fuel every day, Chikason Industries in Anambra spend nearly 20,000 litres as well as others and these people that can utilise embedded generation. If they go embedded generation, you will see relief go to the national grid and power can also go other places that they had not gone to. Embedded generation works.

Again, how did commitments to gas supply to power failed?