Discos can’t succeed in killing eligible customer electricity scheme for us—MAN
The Director General, Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), Segun Ajayi-Kadir has vowed that the daylight blockage of eligible customer electricity scheme by the electricity Distribution Companies (Discos) cannot frustrate us in getting power direct from Gencos.
In a recent interview in Lagos, he revealed that “We are making progress and a number of our projects are almost maturing. We are trying to overcome the challenges that the Discos have put to deliberately block our members from accessing the Eligible Customer Scheme (ECS), but we are overcoming it, and we are engaging all the stakeholders in order to access this, and if that happens, we are likely to experience a dramatic improvement of our access to power.”
Added to the emerging ECS window, MAN has incrementally generated at least 13,000MW of electricity under the IPPs and micro-grid platforms, to meet their operational demand, as generated power from the national grid remained insufficient.
Already, MAN is working on the template to use the Manufacturers Power Development Company (MPDC), as a vehicle to achieve the gradual transition from dependence on DisCos for electricity to its IPPs.
However, with alternative energy utilisation and relative improvement in electricity supply to manufacturing companies from the national grid, expenditure on electricity in the sector totalled N43.19 billion in the first half of 2018 against N66.03 billion recorded in the comparable period of 2017; thus, indicating a decline of 34.6 per cent during the period under review.
