Yemisi Izuora
The federal government has said that concerted efforts are currently going on to address critical issues weakening progress in the power sector.
According to the power minister Chinedu Nebo technical and commercial energy losses constitutes major challenges to the development of the sector.
Speaking at the official opening of Power African Workshop
in Lagos on monday with the theme “Metering, Billing and Loss Reduction” the minister said energy would be exerted to address those challenges.
Nebo who was represented by Mr Godknows Igali, Permanent Secretary,
Ministry of Power explained that the workshop aims at finding ways the
power sector can reduce
technical losses.
The minister said that the objective of the workshop also aims at introducing
participants to best industry practices in collections, billing, losses,
theft reduction and marketing of their commodities to the end users.
According to him, Nigeria Power Sector Reform is the biggest most
transparent power sector in the world and that the forum is critical to the
sector at this time that government is poised to tackle seeming challenges of the industry.
“The technical and commercial losses affect both consumers and
companies in areas of effective distribution companies” he said just as he disclosed that as at today about N390 billion has been paid as severance package benefits to defunct power sector workers.
According to him, about 45,000 workers have been settled while cases of about 2,000 workers with identification issues are still pending.
The minister also blamed vandalism as a big challenge, adding that
power generation has reached about 5,000 mega watts but was truncated by vandals.
He said the sector is still battling with both technical and
commercial losses which needed urgent solution, adding that Federal
Government has taken steps to close metering gaps in the country.
Government he said has approved funds for the procurement of one million electricity meters and assured that local meter manufacturers are going to be patronized as government will not import pre-paid meter to serve
electricity customers.
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He said the private sector owners of the electricity distribution
companies inherited a lot of customers who had no meters.
“The private sector inherited a customer base in which 50 per cent do
not have meters. Nigeria has the highest per capital electricity theft in the world.
That is why we are now doing smart meters and we are moving to a place where the meters will be mounted on poles, because something has to be done fast.
According to the minister, As a result of the burden on the Discos due to meter issues, the President has provided funding to give over one million meters to Nigerians to reduce the gap and then allow the Discos ensure that all customers are given meters.
Mr Reuben Okeke, Director General, National Power Training Institute
of Nigeria (NAPTIN) in his comment also identified technical, commercial and
collection losses as a big challenge.
Okeke said that the new distribution utility owners have decried that the losses they met in their distribution network are much more that they were told.
Mr Thomas Onyekauwah, Director, Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN)
said the company recorded about 15 per cent losses in their transmission network.
Onyekauwah said that the company was indebted to the tune of N1.2
billion as transmission loses within August to September in 2014 which
is 0.65 per cent.
He said that most of the losses come from energy theft by some high
profile customers who tapped electricity illegally.
From last quarter of 2014 to date we have reduce our technical
losses to 5 per cent.