[BREAKING] Barth Nnaji: Nigeria Must Generate At Least 100,000 Megawatts of Power to Meet It’s Needs 

Former Minister of Power, Professor Barth Nnaji, has said Nigeria must generate and deliver at least 100,000 megawatts of electricity to meet its national needs, describing the current power infrastructure as grossly inadequate and incapable of supporting meaningful economic growth.

Speaking in an interview with ARISE NEWS on Friday, Professor Nnaji warned that despite decades of reforms, Nigeria’s power sector remains structurally weak, financially unsustainable, and far behind the real energy demands of its population and industries.

“My number, which I continue to say anywhere, is that we need at least 100,000 megawatts of power here to be available, not just merely installed, to be able to serve this country,” he said.

However, he said that the transmission infrastructure in its current state cannot carry anything close to the volume required, calling for an urgent upgrade of infrastructure across all tiers of the electricity value chain—generation, transmission, and distribution.

“Financing-wise, the federal government needs to rethink what we had established earlier, which was a kind of guarantee instrument that will ensure that investors in power are able to invest in power generation, wherever, whichever method, whether it is solar, whether it is natural gas, whether it is hydro, to supply to DISCOs.

“So this is a very important guarantee instrument. And I’m not sure that the state governments as sub-sovereigns will have capacity to do this in terms of being able to guarantee investment in generation of power in their areas. But perhaps a state like Lagos might be able to do it. Maybe some groups of states might be able to achieve this.

“But we have to have a discussion on formula. One, to finance. Two, to generate enough. Three, to make transmission and distribution robust. As we are now, the transmission infrastructure is simply not going to be able to carry the required power in the nation,” Nnaji warned.

The former minister, who is also a professor of engineering and founder and chairman of Geometric Power Limited, stressed that Nigeria’s energy mix should be aligned with regional resources.

He said, “If you have locations where solar can be better harvested and we invest in that kind of location to serve the nation, that is good. If we have location where you have natural gas and you build power plants, sometimes people think that unless you build a power plant right at the back of your yard that you’re not going to get the power, you can’t transmit power, but of course the transmission infrastructure must be able to deal with it.

“So distribution companies need to invest in the infrastructure to be robust so that they will be able to distribute power adequately.”