By Salisu Sani-Idris
Abuja: The Niger Delta Power Holding Company L.td., has reiterated commitment to work with relevant stakeholders to overcome the challenges of gas and transmission limitations.
The company’s Managing Director, Mr Chiedu Ugbo, gave the assurance while answering questions from State House Correspondents on Wednesday in Abuja.
Ugbo said that the company had a mandate to ensure effective management and the security of the assets of the organisation for the overall benefits of Nigerians.
According to him, the Federal, State and Local Governments had spent lots of money in terms of the assets that the company developed on behalf of Nigerians.
Ugbo said: ” The assets are there so we are charged with the responsibility of making sure that they are utilised for the benefit of Nigerians. We need maximum performance of the assets particularly the power generation assets.
” Yes, we have a gas limitations, we have transmission and distribution limitations, but we are government investment and we will work with the relevant stakeholders to make sure that we resolve this challenges.
” And to ensure the loads from this plans are uptaken for the benefit of Nigerians. It is a systemic issues in terms of collections from the distribution company.
“It is a systemic issue and in the course of this we owe some gas companies as well.”
The managing director said that the Regulatory Commission with the government were working to resolve some of the identified challenges within the shortest possible time.
Ugbo said: ” Yes, we are being owed no doubt. At the beginning, we are treated as government owned, so essentially stabilising the system.
“But over time the regulatory commission has also seen some wisdom in ensuring that we have some comparable tariff.
” So recently, there are some adjustments in terms of our generation tariff, the escalations that were required that is before the handover of thisa dministration.
” Shortly by the end of the last administration we saw some improvement by our tariff by the regulatory commission but yes before now from 2013 till April we were seeing as government owned.
” And we are seeing as stabilising the system but they have seen the wisdom in because we go to the same market. Nobody sales gas to us at a cheaper rate to us.”
According to him, nobody sells spares at a cheaper rate to the firm, adding, “so /0the regulatory commission saw that and decided to increase our tariff.
“That has improved though not where it should be but there are some significant improvement.”
Ugbo further stated that the whole grid was challenged by uptake, evacuation from transmission company and uptake by the distribution firms.
He added: ” If distribution doesn’t or is not able to take what transmission can carry, transmission would not be able to take what you can generate.
” So it is as simple as that but we are working assiduously to ensure end-to-end from generation to end users.
“We are working with the distribution companies now, so we are working with transmission company to clear the bottle necks to ensure that we reach the end users.
“As we have seen, we have distribution interventions all over the country. And all these things are to ensure that we improve the distribution capacity of the distribution companies.” (NAN) (www.nannews.ng)
