Nigeria to boost power sector with N470bn

Nigeria’s cabinet has approved N470.8 billion for the purchase of maintenance equipment for the nation’s power sector.

Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu, revealed this while briefing State House Correspondents at the end of this week’s cabinet meeting presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari.

The Minister said the equipment to be procured include isolators and circuit breakers.

“I presented two memos to the council. And I’ve gotten the approval for both. The first memo was to seek approval for the award of a contract for procurement of 40 sets of 330 kV isolators for the transmission company of Nigeria.

“The isolators are placed at various locations across the grid throughout the country once there is maintenance that is needed to be carried out on a certain part of the grid, this equipment is used to isolate that particular area and allowing the flow of energy on the other areas that is what the isolators are critical maintenance equipment.

“So, usually, as we cannot afford to shut down the system because of lack of this equipment, we stock them in the store so that they can be immediately deployed to the site once that is a need for them. So, this equipment was approved for us at the sum of $989,346.15 cents then, the naira component is N64,236,625 with 7.5 per cent VAT payable at the Central Bank of Nigeria prevailing exchange rate at the time of payment with the delivery period of six months.”

Furthermore, Aliyu disclosed that the approval also covers the purchase of sets of circuit breakers for the Transmission Company of Nigeria.

“The second one is also a critical maintenance equipment. This one is for the procurement of one set of 132 kV chrome temporary circuit breakers, 16 sets of 33Kv ABB circuit breakers and 25 sets of 33Kv compound units, lightning arrestors for the transmission company of Nigeria.

“This is also like the previous one, this one also is critical maintenance equipment, which we need to have on the ground in the store as backups immediately we have faulty ones, we quickly replace them, so that we can maintain service throughout. So, the circuit breakers as you may know are the same as the one you have in your house. Once there is a fault, it will trip off what we call the circuit breakers and if you want to stop the energy from going to the house you can as well clip it off by pushing a button. but this one is on a larger scale and dimension.

“The dimension is large and the capacity also. So it is used on the grid. So, once there is a problem with the power national grid, the circuit breakers will automatically switch off that portion. The contract was approved, after the due processes, in the sum of N362,796,000 inclusive of 7.5 per cent VAT with a delivery period of six months,” the minister explained. (VON)