A power company Century Power, a subsidiary of the Obijackson Group said it plans to generate 1,500 megawatts (MW) power by 2020 when it would have completed the plant by 2020 and start adding the output to the national grid.
The company in a statement said the plant, which is being constructed in Okija, Anambra State, would be built in three phases, the first being 495MW.
Speaking in a panel discussion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT Energy Conference in the United States, Mr. Chukwueloka Umeh Managing Director Century Power, said the company is committed to boosting Nigeria’s electricity generating capacity, saying that the challenges currently facing the power sector in Nigeria are surmountable and are being addressed through private sector initiatives.
He said, “There are challenges facing each facet of the power value chain in the country, starting from gas generation all the way to electricity distribution, and in order to fix these, significant investment is needed.
“A large part of this investment will come from local and foreign investors, but the government must create favourable conditions in all these sub-sectors to ensure influx of these desperately needed investments. It cannot be business as usual.”
He added that Nigerians are entrepreneurial in nature, but needed to have the right infrastructure to unlock the potential that have been talked about for decades.
“It is easy to see that we export timber, but import toothpicks simply because we do not have a steady and reliable supply of electricity to allow SMEs manufacture goods locally at competitive prices, thereby creating jobs for the growing unemployed population.
“The population worries about tariff increases, but do not realize that they actually pay much higher tariffs by generating their own power with petrol or diesel powered generators,” he argued.
On renewable energy, he said that what Nigeria still needs are large baseload plants, with the capacity to generate from 100MW and above.
According to him, renewables are essential to help preserve the environment, and sources such as hydro are definitely good to have in the power mix.
