Managing Director, Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC), Chief Chiedu Ugbo has led other stakeholders in the electricity industry to the groundbreaking of the Light Up Agbara project.
At the ceremony which was held within the premises of Evans Baroque on Thursday, Ugbo who represented Vice President Kashim Shettima noted that NDPHC is the catalyst as far as provision of electricity is concerned in the country.
According to him, the Nigerian Federation has invested in us so much to the extent that we have four thousand 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 and Nigerians were still not getting the most benefit, 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 Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) and then 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."
According to him, Eko DisCo was brought into the Agbara scheme because it is the owner of this 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 groundbreaking today. We are also working with our distribution contractors who will do the reticulation together with Millwater to the various customers.
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 assiduously to light other parts of Nigeria and has so far launched the light Up South East version with Vice President Kashim Shettima leading the charge.
The North East version of the project she explained, will be launched in Bauchi next month.
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Mba said: "That we are at this stage today is because the Chairman of our Board, Vice President Kashim Shettima is bringing his influence to bear on this Initiative. Agbara will soon be replicated across Nigeria. After Bauchi and Kano, we plan to be in Port Harcourt.
Also speaking on the capacity of NDPHC to make the Light Up Nigeria a reality, NDPHC Executive Director, Generation Engr. Kassim Abdulahi declared that NDPHC had 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.
