ONGOING Independent Power Projects (IPPs) through Joint venture(JV) partnerships with international oil companies are expected to generate an additional 7,250 Megawatts (MW)of electricity when completed.

This was disclosed by the Special Adviser to the President on Electric Power, Dr. Joseph Makoju during a public lecture titled: The Future of Power Supply in Nigeria organised by The Professionals, a group of academicians, engineers and other players in diverse sectors of the economy in Lagos.

According to him an agreement had already been reached with the government of China for the implementation of the 2600MW Mambilla Hydro power station which will generate about 2600MW of power.

Preparatory activities for the Geometric project in Aba are ongoing and is expected to bring about 150MW, while agreement has also been reached with the Government of South Korea for the construction of a gas trunk that will extend up North to Kaduna. The project also includes the construction of power stations that will bring on stream about 2000MW of electric power.

"Over 90 transmission projects and 286 distribution projects are currently on-going or about to commence at different locations across the country to evacuate, wheel and distribute the new capacity.

The Owerri-Ahoada-Yenagoa transmission line has also been commissioned and has effectively linked Bayelsa to the National grid, while the 330Kv Ikeja West (Nigeria)-Sakete (Benin) interconnection has also been commissioned.

Dr. Makoju, however, blamed the sorry state of the power sector on past administrations which did nothing at maintaining or investing in the power sector for over two decades, while he appealed for patience on the part of Nigerians saying that eleven power stations are presently being constructed nationwide and that if each incoming government in the last twenty years had built one power station, there would have been a lot of changes on the ground at present.

"The state of the nation pre-1999 can best be described as unfortunate as existing infrastructure were in many instances denied routine maintenance and were in a terrible state of disrepair, only 19 out of 79 generation units were operational. We had on our hands two decades of poor planning and underdevelopment which left a huge supply deficit.

No new infrastructure was built in over a decade despite the rapid growth in population and rising demand for power. Also, less than two per cent of the transmission development plan of 1995 to 2005 was implemented.

In the 70's, power generation capacity between Nigeria and Iran were both at about the same level while today, Iran's power generation capacity with a population of 70 million, stands at 42.0 Gigawatt well over ten times that of Nigeria which is presently standing at about 2,800 mega watts.

South Africa is currently on 800 watts per person while Nigeria is on 30 watts per person and to achieve the equivalent of 800 watts per person, Nigeria needs to generate 104,000MW of power." he said.