The Minister of Power, Prof Chinedu Nebo, on Wednesday said there will be more shut down in power due to ongoing maintenance work on installations across the country.
Nebo, while explaining why there was a sharp drop in power supply in Nigeria, said the country lost 1112megawatts of generated electricity within two days due to the shutdown of gas plant by oil giant, Chevron.
He spoke in Abuja at the ministry's headquarters. He said, "A few days ago, precisely last week Friday, Chevron shut down its gas plant for maintenance purposes which was to take place between Friday and Saturday. And the technical crew in the power sector knew about the shut down and this was in order to make sure that damages are not done before losing the gas entirely.
"From time to time there is going to be shutdown and it happened two times recently between Benin and Osogbo. If you don't shutdown these plants, in order to have a safe restarting process, you are going to lose the equipment. Once routine maintenance is done, the process of restarting the machines that were shutdown take some time.
He said two power stations were affected by the recent shutdown, stressing that the oil company and the ministry's technicians had to maintain the plants. He added, "That is why between two and three days we lost some 1112MW. That means Omotoso and Olorunsogo plants were forced to shut down because there was no gas supply. By design, Chevron has to maintain the gas pipelines and it was so. You will notice that from Monday we started seeing some increase that has stabilise.”
A penny for your thought though-before the drop, there was no power supply! Now you can begin to imagine what precarious situation we are in
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