Vice President Mohammed Namadi Sambo has assured the Genesis Electricity (GE) Consortium an electricity conglomerate of availability of lots of activities and opportunities in the Nigeria’s power supply sector.
He was speaking in his office at the state House Abuja when he received the management of the consortium led by Nigerian businessman prince Arthur Eze who paid him a courtesy visit.
The vice president expressed appreciation for the confidence reposed in the Nigerian economy by the consortium to invest massively in the energy sector and revive the Port-Harcourt refinery.
He was appreciative of one of the members of the consortium General Electric for partnering with Nigeria to develop her power sector. And particularly noted their investments in plants that would support the sector in Calabar injecting $300million into the financial sector and their plans to support training of Nigerians to strengthen the power sector
Sambo used the occasion to appraise the efforts of government in putting institutional reforms that would guarantee private sector participation. He stated that government, in her efforts to improve power generation, has planned to invest the sum of $8billion on a Public Private Partnership (PPP) basis to develop local gas potentials and that there is a move to fast-track the system to ensure availability of gas to her plants by involving owners of the new plants and international oil companies to get involved in Gas infrastructure.
The Vice President also added that government has plans to inject $3.7billion to upgrade and expand the transmission grid so as to be able to wheel up to 20,000 mw. Other power related issues discussed were the efforts of government on the Zungeru and Mambila hydro power projects which were expected to generate 700mw and 3,050 mw respectively; and the pilot scheme of the wind power project which would provide about 10mw, solar power and coal to power where he disclosed that a Chinese company has came up with a proposal to generate 1,000mw in Enugu in an effort to ensure mixed generation capacity.
Speaking earlier, Chairman GE, Arthur Eze told the vice president that they intended to invest the sum of $100 million in the Port-Harcourt Refinery project in order to ensure triple redundancy so that the refinery never goes down and promised to extend frontiers of their investments to Kaduna and other refineries.
Present at the meeting were the Hassan Dawood Chairman ENGRO, Darry Wilson Vice President GE, Ali Ansari CEO ENGRO, George Njenga General Manager GE, Syed Muhammad Ali CEO/POWERGEN amongst others.
