At a time the economy is passing through recession, details emerged yesterday that two of the nation’s power plants were shut down. This raises the number of idle plants to 9.
The affected plants were Olorunsogo II in Ogun State and Trans-Amadi in Rivers State, with their installed generation capacity put at 625 megawatts and 25MW, respectively.
The development caused a massive drop in generation bringing the nation’s total electricity generation to 3,402.5MW.
The generation from the nation’s biggest power station, Egbin in Lagos, dropped to 451MW from 465MW by last week.
It was recorded in a new data released that Olorunsogo II, which was built under the National Integrated Power Project scheme, did not generate any megawatt of electricity because its units GT1, 2, 3 and 4 and ST2 were out due to gas constraints, and the ST1 out on maintenance. The plant produced 130.9MW on Wednesday.
Units GT1 and 2 of Trans-Amadi were said to be out on undisclosed reasons, while the GT4 was out due to gas constraints. It generated 15MW of electricity on Wednesday.
Within the period under review, other plants that did not produce electricity weekend were Alaoji II with an installed capacity of 250MW; Ihovbor II, 337.5MW; Afam VI, 650MW; Rivers, 160MW; Afam IV & V, AES and ASCO, whose capacities were put at zero.
The nation’s unutilised generation capacity rose to 4120.1MW yesterday from 3,473.8MW on Wednesday, with gas constraints responsible for about 80 per cent of the stranded capacity at 3,269MW.
Factors fingered for the development include line constraints and high frequency occasioned by rainfall/loss of distribution companies’ feeder.
Line constraints and high frequency led to the shut in of 371.7MW and 479.4MW, respectively on Sunday, up from 368.8MW and 85MW on Wednesday.
It would be recalled that Nigeria hit its peak generation of 5,074.70MW on February 2, 2016, according to the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN).
