“Power outage due to shortage of gas” – Minister assures that grid has been restored

Minister of power, Abubakar Aliyu has assured that the collapsed grid has been restored. He said other challenges have led to the nationwide power outage apart from the issue of the drop in water level at dams.

He stated this Wednesday while fielding questions from State House reporters after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting presided over by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

He said; “The more reason we are facing the situation now is as a result of the shortage of gas and some of the generators have to go to maintenance.

“It is a scheduled maintenance and it is supposed to be scheduled outage, but we had not envisaged that we will have issues around vandalization of pipelines, which the NNPC has addressed as you can see evidently everywhere, aviation fuel, and petrol in the filling stations. It is a combination of many factors that compounded the problem we are having on the grid.

“We have recovered the grid now. The grid is back and we are trying to get more megawatts to push on the grid. We have set up small committees all geared towards getting more megawatts to put on the grid. Basically, the problem around gas. You need to have gas contract between generating companies and gas suppliers- some are form contracts, some are not. We are looking into this and have proffered some solutions in some few days to mature,”he said