The Senate during a plenary
The Senate yesterday suspended the planned commissioning of the 215 megawatts Kaduna power plant over alleged inconsistencies in the contract implementation and inflation of cost.
The decision was taken by the joint committee on gas and power, steel development and metallurgy headed by Bassey Albert and Enyinnaya Abaribe after an investigative hearing on the “urgent need to save the 215 mw Kaduna Power Plant.”
In its report, the committee observed that the power plant which was inaugurated in 2009 was already three years behind the scheduled commissioning.
At the public hearing, the lawmakers said they were unimpressed by the reasons given by the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Power, Mr. Louis Edozie who defended the change of the parameters of the plant from a gas- powered to diesel-powered facility.
Representatives of the ministry led by the permanent secretary said they planned to commission one of the units in the plant in January and that it would run on diesel, costing the country N46 million per day.
The lawmakers were however alarmed to hear that the cost would be far
cheaper if the plant was to run on gas.
Chairman of GreenVille LNG, Eddy Van Den Broeke, told the committee that the company had a Memorandum of
Understanding with the Kaduna Gas Plant to build storage facilities for the plant at no cost.
He also stated that while the plant would produce a kilowatt of electricity at N79 if run on diesel, it would produce the same kilowatt
of power at N37 with gas. He said his company had, as a result of the MOU it signed with the power plant, invested $400 million on its gas plant in Roumuji, Port Harcourt.
Broeke further said: “In 2014 when the parametres were signed, it was agreed that LNG is most competitive. We have invested $400million after which people in the ministry decided to change the parametres. It will cost $200 million more to use AGO (diesel) because there is no other fuel available that can replace LNG and GreenVille.”
According to him, apart from the functional gas plant, Greenville already
imported 250 trucks to evacuate gas to the power plant before the change of parameters by the ministry.
Co-chairman of the joint committee, Bassey directed the permanent secretary to inform the Minister of Power, Works and Housing
that the senate had stopped the planned commissioning. “I feel very disappointed,” he said.
