₦39 billion loan approved for Discos’ metering plan
Efforts to bridge the over 10 million metering gap may have received the desired boost as the Federal Government has approved about ₦39 billion to procure meters for customers.
Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr. Babatunde Fashola, announced the lifeline for Discos at the 18th Monthly Power Sector Stakeholders Meeting hosted by Kano Electricity Distribution Company (KEDCO).
Fashola said the gesture was part of power sector recovery programme of the government aimed at ensuring uninterrupted power generation and distribution. He added that it was also aimed at ensuring that every consumer of electricity is provided with a meter.
“It is also aimed at ending the series of complaints by consumers who applied for meter but were not supplied at the appropriate time,” he said.
The Minister explained that the successful implementation of the power sector recovery programme would assist in resolving the conflict between distributors and consumers over tariff collection.
Fashola said that power generation improved tremendously in 2017 to 6,863 megawatts compared to 2016.
Meanwhile, the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) says it has secured $1.55 billion credit facilities from multilateral aid agencies to finance its transmission expansion projects in the country.
The Managing Director of TCN, Mr. Usman Mohammed, told journalists in Kano on Monday that TCN had approached multilateral donors to raise significant finance to execute its numerous projects in the country.
He said sourcing of fund was also designed to realise TCN’s ambition of increasing transmission capacity by 20,000 megawatts in few years time. He explained that the provision of the fund had resulted in the resuscitation of some projects that were hitherto abandoned.
“The Abuja transmission project, which is supposed to provide three sub-stations and provide another avenue for supply through Abuja from Lafia, has been completed. We have also resuscitated the JAICA project that has been on the drawing board for a long some time now.
“Those two projects, plus others, cost about 1.55 billion dollars, which is coming from the World Bank, African Development Bank (AfDB) the Islamic Development Bank, JAICA itself and the European Union (EU).”
Mohammed said that the TCN was also collaborating with the state governments to resolve the problem of right of ways on transmission lines in the country.
“The payment of compensation to right of ways issue in Nigeria is a big problem, so in trying to expand capacity of transmission lines, the right of ways is a big problem and that is why we are collaborating with state governments.”
He said that Kaduna State government had paid some compensation for some of the places TCN intended to construct transmission lines.
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