NBS: Four Million Electricity Users Don’t Have Meters
Ndubuisi Francis
No fewer than 4.1 million of about 7.5 million Nigerians with access to electricity across the country are not meterd by the distribution companies, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has said.
The NBS, in its ‘Power Sector Report: Energy Generated and Sent Out and Consumed and Load Allocation,’ for the last quarter of 2017, noted that only 46.16 per cent of the total electricity consumers were captured to have been metered, with over half of them remaining unmetered.
According to the report, the Benin disco represented the highest percentage of metered customers with 69 per cent of electricity users in the state.
Eko disco has 60.73 per cent and Ikeja disco with 55.95 per cent came second and third respectively while Yola and Enugu discos posted the least percentage of customers metered with 23.61 per cent and 27.72 per cent respectively.
The NBS’ report shows that the Benin disco had a total number of 535,935 metered customers from 771,226 electricity users, Abuja disco 450,044 metered customers from 862,696 electricity users.
Eko disco had 442,201 electricity users with 268,558 metered customers, Enugu had 224,444 metered customers from 809,829 electricity users, Kano had 162,664 metered customers from a total of 472,453 electricity users, Port Harcourt had 237,188 metered customers from 488,600 electricity users and Yola had 69,282 metered customers from 293,473 electricity users.
According to the NBS, daily energy generation attained, a peak of 105,152mwh on December 8, 2017 with thermal stations generating 84,026mwh while the hydro stations generated 21, 126 megawatts per hour (mwh) and total average of 94,627mwh of energy generated daily by power stations during the period.
The lowest energy generated in the quarter was 73,246mwh as against the previous quarter of 56,486mwh generated daily, s figure which was attained in October 2017.
In the reference period, thermal stations generated 55,941mwh while the hydro stations generated the 17,305mwh.