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Agatha Chitumu, Abuja
DAILY COURIER - The Minister of Power, Mr Adebayo Adelabu has hinted of federal government readiness to close metering gap by providing not less than 10 million meters to electricity consumers in the next five years.
Adelabu gave the hint in Abuja on Friday, during the ministerial briefing on the performance of President Bola Tinubu’s administration in the last one year.
The provision of the meters, under the Presidential Metering Initiative according to him would close the meter gap and reduce estimated billing.
The minister said that the initiative was scheduled to provide two million meters per annum in the next five years to improve sector liquidity and limit estimated billing.
“We have over seven million meter gap in the industry, out of over 12 million customers, just a little over five million are metered.
“Everybody is complaining of estimated billing and the president is determined to put an end to estimated billing,” he said.
In a related development, the ministry said it had just completed the bidding process for another 1.5 million meters financed by the World Bank Distribution Support Recovery Programme to improve sector liquidity.
He said that in a few months, the contracts for the meters would be awarded to meter providers.
"About 50,000 meters were procured and deployed to military formations nationwide to reduce Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs) debts.
"In November 2023, Tinubu and German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, witnessed the signing of an accelerated performance agreement to continue on Presidential Power Initiative (PPI) – the SIEMENs Project." the minister added.
The project the minister added aimed at improving electricity supply in the country, saying that the implementation of the pilot phase had resulted in infrastructure improvement.
“This includes additional grid evacuation capacity by 280 Megawatts (MW) and additional 183MW to be inaugurated by the end of June,” he said.
"In the Phase 1 of the PPI, the Federal Government planned to carry out the rehabilitation of 15 brown field sub-stations by August, and construction of 22 green field sub-stations by October.
“This is a total of 37 sub-stations across the country and once this is completed, the sector will be able to deliver stable power supply.
"We all know what we passed through in the February and March generation, but we rose to the occasion and we made sure we change the situation for the better.
“Our target is to achieve 6,000 megawatts before the end of this year.
"We generated, transmitted and distributed 5,503.45 megawatts of power, where we have been generating below 4,000." he said.
This medium gathered that the power sector has been able to achieve 5,000 MW of power on May 3, for the first time in three years.
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