Adebayo Adelabu, Minister of Power has revealed that Nigeria requires an investment of $10 billion annually over the next 10 to 20 years to achieve stable and reliable electricity supply,
Adelabu stated this on Tuesday while speaking with journalists after commissioning a 2.5 megawatts (MW) solar hybrid power project at the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) in Kaduna.
He said the power sector has suffered from six decades of infrastructure deficits caused by inadequate maintenance, limited investment, and failure to upgrade transmission systems.
The minister stated, “For us to achieve functional reliable and stable electricity in Nigeria, we need not less than $10 billion annually for the next ten to twenty years,”
“But there are some foundational bottleneck that we experienced in the past that need to be fixed for the spending of this money to have meaning.”
Adelebu disclosed that the signing of the energy bill into an act is one of the important steps taken by the government to tackle the challenges in the power sector.
He added, “This bill has achieved liberation and decentralization of the power sector to enable all levels of government – federal, state and local governments to legally and morally play roles in the power sector to give their citizens at sub national levels electricity.
“This has given autonomy to more than eleven states and more are still coming. They can now play roles in the power sector from generation to transmission to distribution and even metering.
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“Secondly, we talk about infrastructure deficit, then we talk about fixing infrastructure deficit which has piled up over the last 60 years due to lack of maintenance, lack of additional investment to revive our transmission grid.”
He reiterated the government’s commitment to addressing the infrastructure deficit and delivering dependable energy to critical national institutions.
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