GenCos and DisCos cometh but darkness prevails
The Electric Power Sector of Nigeria has in the past 20 years has witnessed very slow improvement despite huge government and private sector investment that has run into trillions of naira.
The history of electricity in Nigeria dates back to 1898 when the first generating plant with a capacity of 60KW was installed in Lagos. To effectively coordinate the development power infrastructure, the colonial government introduced the Statute No. 15 of 1950 that established the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN) basically controlling electricity generated from gas and fossil fuel.
In 1972 the Gowon regime merged ECN with the Niger Dams Authority (NDA) that was created in the 1960s for hydropower generation from the River Niger. The merger by Decree No. 24 of April 1, 1972 created the National Electric Power Authority, NEPA. NEPA operated as an integrated utility company and had a total generation capacity of about 6,200 megawatt (mw) from two hydro and 4 thermal (gas) power plants. The continuous growth in the country’s population resulted in an unstable and unreliable electric power supply situation with customers exposed to frequent power outage. The industry also experienced poor maintenance culture of power infrastructure, obsolete power plants like the Oji River coal power, poor revenue generation, power theft.
NEPA was transformed into Power Holding Company of Nigeria [PHCN] and was unbundled into 18 companies prior to privatisation. In 2013, 5 power generating companies [Gencos] and 13 power distribution companies [Discos] were privatised while government retained ownership of the Transmission Company of Nigeria, TCN. Despite those major reforms, most of the problems of the power sector still remain. high losses, and