GE Gas Power is targeting to add 500 megawatts (MW) of additional power into the national electricity grid by the second quarter of this year when its ongoing projects should have been completed, the President and Chief Executive Officer, GE Nigeria, Mr Mohammed Mijindadi, has said.
He revealed that it had three new projects that would deliver close to 500mw and listed them as the 240MW Afam III power plant in Port Harcourt, 50MW Maiduguri project with the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC) and another 50MW project for Dangote Group to support its cement and refinery plants, among others.
He spoke in Lagos during a roundtable session with journalists, on the topic, “Powering the Future of Energy in Nigeria with GE.”
He said that Nigeria’s power sector was challenged by multiple factors, adding that with Nigeria’s total installed generation capacity of about 13000mw, only between 3,500 to 5000MW were typically available for onward transmission to the final consumer.
Noting that the nation’s power sector is faced with weak infrastructure and a high occurrence of significant technical and nontechnical challenges, he lamented that this comes with extensive losses.
Mijindadi said: “With regards to new projects, we actually do have three new projects that would add close to 500mw. We’re working to complete the Afam III power plant in Port Harcourt. That project is 240mw. “We’re hoping that by the end of this first quarter or early second quarter, that project should be done.
That is an important project because when it goes into talking about what GE is doing, I think we have crafted that project as a way to reduce the pressure on the government from a balance sheet standpoint.
“So, we designed that project with a different structure. Unfortunately, we’ve been working on that project since 2016. With the change in government, there had been adjustments and all of that, but we’re hoping that by end of this quarter or early second quarter, that should be done.”
