Abah John Abah: Tackling the mirage of power supply

Some few years ago while approaching the off-port limit of the Lagos Apapa Port in a Nigerian gas tanker, my expatriate boss took a dig at me.

We were on duty at the Navigation Bridge and the night view of the Lagos coast line was just appearing on the horizon. He had already planned his bad joke to have the maximum effect.

On his computer screen, he had downloaded a night sky-view of Lagos in darkness with few spots of light and placed it beside a night view of one brightly lit European city.

He posed the question to me: How can Nigeria be exporting gas to lit up cities around the world while we remain in darkness as if to symbolize our colour or the tag of a dark continent? I was speechless, the coast coming to view from the horizon agrees with the pictures he was showing me.

Nigeria has been grappling with crippling power supply crisis for two decades without an end in sight despite the multi-billion dollar investment in the sector. Successive administrations had come beating their chests with declaration of emergency in the sector and promising to give Nigerians ‘light’ in a short time.

We are still groping in darkness. Power remains the biggest factor in the ever increasing cost of doing business in Nigeria. Investors are turned away when they take the repugnant sniff of our business climate, no thanks to crumbling infrastructure, bad government policy and insecurity.

What are the best approaches and the most sustainable options towards tackling the electricity menace?

As at April 2015, our peak electricity demand stands at 12,800 megawatts (MW) while actual generation at the time is 3,900MW. In the last one year, generation oscillates between 4,500MW and 3,500MW. What that means is that only about a third of Nigerians and facilities, connected to electricity, can get supply at a time and almost 70% suffers in darkness. Note that this demand can double or triple if every homes and facilities are connected to power.

Our actual power need can be in excess of 38,00MW! We are actually a nation in darkness. Nigeria combined power installations across the country is 13,672MW, if we add that to planned and on-going projects of about 4,935, we have 18,607MW, what we will get if we have all our power projects running at full capacity, still a far cry from about 40,000MW required to light up the whole country. Compare that with present supply of less than 4,000MW, only about 10% of actual need.

How best do we overcome this mirage? There are identifiable problems with the whole electric power chain- generation, transmission and distribution.
Nigeria investment in power generation in the last two decades has been one-sided and ill-advisedly tilted towards gas power stations. Gas power station arguably is a very important and easy option but I dare to argue that that is not the only area we hold a comparative power advantage.

We started off relying more on hydroelectric stations that are, in many respects, more immuned from problems. The reasons are obvious. We generate electricity from gas through gas-fired turbines while hydroelectricity comes from water-driven turbines. To operate a gas power station effectively, there must be a gas gathering infrastructure complete with a gas supply pipeline system.

The efficiency of the power station is tied to the efficiency of the many firms saddled with running the gas supply chain. And these operations are often threatened by the fragile security situations in the gas bearing regions. Compare that with a hydro-station that requires just putting a dam across a free river.

Currently, most of our completed gas thermal stations are not operational many years after commissioning. They are tied to gas supply systems that are either not yet built or have no capacity to meet demand. Many gas plants are hampered by security issues. The most curious of the problems is the inability of the power stations to work out gas supply agreement with the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG), a world-renowned gas supplier.

The pretext is that most of the local power plants cannot meet their safety requirements. There seem to be conflict between the government export policy and that of power generation. You can see why I had to take that dig from my expatriate boss.

The government is more interested in the immediate morsel from gas export than strengthening our capacity to grow.
We seem obsessed with petroleum resources to the negligence of other viable options. Gas is not the only non-renewable fossil fuel we can exploit for power generation.

Nigeria have many untapped coal deposits across the country but today we have only one planned coal thermal plant, the Itobe Coal Plant billed to generate 1,200MW when completed. If electricity is the only use we can find for our huge coal deposits in many parts of the country, we will be the better. Coal thermal plant does not need expensive technology.

Just scoop pulverized coals into a furnace built close-by and we have enough heat to drive some turbines.

There are still yet many options in the energy mix to generate power. I have delivered gas to many power plants across the world and have seen what an integrated power station is.

There are a vast sources of renewable energy nature has bestowed us with but we seem to ignore. In an integrated power station, we can aggregated all these to soar up generation.

It is common to see farms of wind vanes and photo-electric (solar) panels integrated in power stations in other parts of the world. These installations can be built in open shallow sea, in dry desert land or even in hill tops.

Not long ago I passed by the sewage treatment plant of the Agbara Federal Housing Estate and when the methane-laden odour of the open sewage pool hit me I was reminded of the enormous potential waste holds for power generation.

Every dry carboneous waste can be burned to generate electricity but a very efficient energy can come from decomposing waste. Sewage produces a lot of bio-gas that can fire small generation plants.

We can improve our sewage and waste management systems to harness this. An efficient integrated sewage system in our housing estates across the country can generate power for most of these housing schemes.

So much has been noised around lately about Nigeria planning nuclear generating plants. Without doubt this is the most potent power source and we have radioactive mineral deposits in some places across the country to drive the project.

Considering the hi-tech engineering and safety standard required to handle this I wouldn’t advise a rush into that sector. Even Japan with all her advance technology lately contended with safety disasters in their nuclear plants. A bottom up approach will be better. Let us increase and improve our capacity in the easier, less expensive, less difficult options. Improved power supply from the cheaper options will improve our capacity to deal with the challenges nuclear plant can pose.

Can Nigeria play the high-wired international politics required in nuclear energy development? It is difficult to convince the international community of your intention and get them cooperate with you.

Our power transmission capacity too is very poor and marred by myriad of problems ranging from poor investment, poor policy and insecurity. Early planners of our power expansion programs did not take into account our crumbling transmission infrastructure and did not conceive a transmission backbone to grow with generation.

The result is that many completed power generation companies cannot evacuate all the power they produce. The existing transmission lines are archaic, cumbersome and too expensive to maintain.

The power deregulation policy and unbundling failed in this regard. The so-called “National Grid” is too complex and expensive to maintain and cannot cope with modern realities. A decentralized system that is modernized should be fancied.

We should think of an integrated infrastructure where national highways and rail lines are planned to carry underground trunk ways, tunnels or pipes to house our high tension cables, water supply pipes and other products. Underground systems that take advantage of existing right-of-ways will be less expensive and immuned from vandalism.

I have written a piece on power distribution before and I will still stress that we are doing badly in power conservation. Most of the discos are encouraging power wastage and corruption by refusing to invest in proper metering.

The present situation is a loss-loss for everyone. Prepaid metering will encourage every electricity users to invest in more efficient power saving equipment, plug out wastages and reduce corruption among electricity workers.

The unfair estimated billing systems does not encourage users to pay bill while the disco field workers are more interested in taking bribes and turn a blind eye.
The present head of the power ministry has his job cut out.

Experts believe that given a right policy the power problem can be solved even without budgetary allocation for projects. We have a model in the telecom sector though the power sector is more complex. Investors are cash-ready to throw money into the sector if the right deregulation policy in place.

Abah John Abah, entrepreneur, geologist and public interest commentator on Oil & Gas, Power and Environment writes from Lagos Nigeria.