NDPHC, Partners Conduct Ground-breaking Event for Agbara Power Project
*Power generation firm seeks full deployment of its 4,000mw capacity
Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja
Managing Director, Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC), Chief Chiedu Ugbo has led other stakeholders in the electricity industry to the ground-breaking of the Light Up Agbara project.
At the ceremony which held within the premises of Evans Baroque, Ugbo who represented Vice President Kashim Shettima noted that NDPHC remains a catalyst as far as the provision of electricity was concerned in the country.
“The Nigerian Federation has invested in us so much to the extent that we have 4,000 megawatts generation capacity built with people’s funds but it is grossly underutilised due to a number of factors outside NDPHC’s control.”
He narrated that despite the huge investment in the power sector, Nigerians were still not getting the most benefit, reason the NDPHC decided to take the lead by coming up with the idea of ‘Light Up Nigeria’ by rallying everybody in the industry together.
“For many years, worried about what we can do to salvage the situation. I have been working with the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) and then a few years ago, we started partnering with Eko Disco. We did a bilateral agreement and then we signed the framework agreement and I insisted that we must go to Agbara, being the industrial cluster in sub-Saharan Africa to salvage the situation. We must provide electricity to industrial areas.
“What the sector needs is the synergy by every stakeholder from gas through generation, through transmission, through distribution to end users. For us, the issue is to seek out the load centres like Agbara.
“Agbara is a pilot for the Light Up Nigeria Initiative. We brought the vice president here, who himself is leading this charge on behalf of the president to ensure that we energise businesses to enable industrial growth,” he stated.
According to him, Eko DisCo was brought into the Agbara scheme because it is the owner of the franchise area while NDPHC is a generation company.
“For our electricity to be dispatched, there must be demand and it is that demand that we are working on. That demand has to be facilitated by effective electricity transportation and that is why we brought in TCN and that is why we have FGN power Company to unlock the bottlenecks in the transmission.
“That is why we are here today. The FGN power has taken the first step by bringing the mobile transformer to install and that is why we are having the ground-breaking today. We are also working with our distribution contractors who will do the reticulation together with Millwater to the various customers,” he added.
Giving an update on the Light Up Nigeria project, NDPHC Executive Director, Corporate Services, Ms Nkechi Mba disclosed that aside Agbara, the company was also working to light other parts of Nigeria and has so far launched the light Up South-east version with Shettima leading the charge.
The North-east version of the project she explained, will be launched in Bauchi next month.
Mba urged stakeholders in Agbara industrial cluster to bear with the delay in completing the project on schedule, explaining that it was due to certain unforeseen circumstances arising from the novelty of the project.
She also commended FGN Power Company for generously providing the mobile transformer that was inaugurated, explaining that the Chairman of the Board, Shettima was bringing his influence to bear on this initiative.
Besides, she stated that Agbara will soon be replicated across Nigeria, explaining that after Bauchi and Kano, NDPHC was planning to be in Port Harcourt.
Also speaking on the capacity of NDPHC to make the Light Up Nigeria a reality, its Executive Director, Generation, Kassim Abdulahi, declared that NDPHC will have more than enough capacity to meet up with every obligation of the initiative.
“We have enough available power in all our power plants. We have almost 3,000MW ready to go, but we are currently dispatching less than 1,000MW,”he disclosed.
