RESOLVING THE POWER SECTOR CONUNDRUM
RESOLVING THE POWER SECTOR CONUNDRUM SYNOPSIS One of the greatest impediments to the country realizing its full economic and social potential is the current comatose state of the power sector. There is currently a huge gap between demand and supply of electricity, made worse by the fact that less than a third of the installed grid generation capacity is wheeled to consumers, necessitating a reliance on captive sources and millions of micro plants scattered all over the country. Power Africa, the US Government initiative for the sector in Africa estimates that total installed capacity is about 16.3GW, which appears to be within range of the figure of 18GW given by the Power Minister recently in an interview. The claims also corroborated a study by the inte rnational consulting firm KPMG, that Nigeria currently generates about 8GW of energy in total. It is however important to note that this figure includes grid, embedded and captive sources and presumably excludes the ubiquitous microp