The Nigerian government plans to generate 20,000 megawatts of electricity by 2026 and 60,000 megawatts by 2060.
Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, disclosed this in Osogbo, Osun State capital during his visit to the National Control Centre (NCC) of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) on Friday.
Adelabu revealed the ministry’s short and long-term objectives for increasing power generation, transmission, and distribution in Nigeria during his speech.
“Like I told you, it’s an aspiration for Nigeria to have minimum of 60,000 megawatts of power by 2060; that is 60 gigawatts. And 2030 is the medium term objective of achieving 30,000 megawatts of power.
“But like I mentioned in one of the programmes I attended, in as much as we are on course in achieving this, given the experiences of other countries who are even able to achieve over 100,000 megawatts within 40 to 50 years, this is not an ambitious target for Nigeria, we can easily achieve it.
“We have target for transmission capacity, we have target for distribution capacity and we have target for power generation capacity. By 2026, we should be able to achieve 20,000 megawatts of electricity,” Adelabu said.
He added that two more power substations would come up in the next few months, courtesy of the presidential power initiative of the federal government.
The Minister also warned that any employee found sabotaging the efforts of government in the power sector would be made to face the music.
He equally revealed that a panel has been set up to investigate what caused the recent inferno at the power substation of the TCN in Birnin Kebbi.
The Minister was accompanied in the visit to Oshogbo by some officials of the ministry as well as top management staff of the TCN.
This is the first facility under his jurisdiction the Adelabu will be visiting since his appointment as minister.