The total debts profile of the Nigeria’s electricity market to the Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC) has hit N190 billion.
Managing Director of the NDPHC, Chiedu Ugbo, who said this during a presentation at the Senate hearing on power, declared that the N190 billion debts has become one of the challenges hampering the growth of the power market.
Despite the challenge posed by the debts, the NDPHC is still working assiduously to deliver on its mandate, Ugbo said.
Stating that the firm’s output is also being hampered by generation and operational challenges, he noted that these include the transmission constraints the company is faced with on a daily basis.
“The NDPHC’s available caoacity is over 3000MW but it is dispatched at 800MW and below by the Systemn Operator because of load rejection by DISCOs.
“This inadequate dispatch grossly affects the company’s revenue generation capacity,” he declared.
Another is irregular dispatch is the one culminating from DisCos load rejection, he said, adding; “The System Operator (SO) order to start up and shut down generation unit due to load rejections are causing increased maintanance costs of the units.”
The NDPHC boss continued; “Three gas plants on the eastern axis of the Niger Delta have full gas but constrained by dispatch challenges.
“In the same vein, five gas plants on the Western axis of the Niger Delta have major insufficient gas supply. As at today, gas requirement is about 560 mmscf per day while only 60 mmscf per day is available. We are negotiating additional 50 mmscf/d with Seplat.”
On liquidity challenge, he said; “there is a low revenue generation due to dispatch challenges.”
Beyond this, he continued; “There are low remittances from the market (NBET). Last colection as at March 2020 is 11.2 per cent of invoiced energy.
“The effects of these are high maintenance cost due to high frequency of shut down and start up. Shortage of spares due to paucity of funds to stock spares and the inability to execute gas constract with take or pay (top) security.”
Ugbo reiterated that the NIPP GENCos under the company’s operations would get the gas fund and pay up.
The NDPHC, he said, would soon receive its part of the payment and has already assured the Group Managing Director of Nigeriqn National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) that as soon as the NDPHC was paid, payment vouchers would be ready, for the immediate remittance to the gas companies.
He said the Calabar NIPP was the only plant with a standard gas supply agreement.
With the availability of gas during this period, he said electricity generation could be ramped up above 400 megawatts (MW) when every other plant was down.
On the distribution section, Mr Ugbo said his firm has been intervening by providing 500KVA transformers, wires and cables to replace faulty ones in the networks of the DISCos to ensure there was more access to electricity during this period.
