A former Minister of Power and Chief Executive Officer, Geometric Power Limited, Prof. Bart Nnaji, has said the firm concluded plans to build a 500-megawatt power plant, in collaboration with the General Electric, at a cost of over $900m.
He said the Unted States government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation would invest about $213m in the project.
He spoke in Lagos on Thursday at the 11th Annual Project Management Lecture organised by the Department of Building, University of Lagos, on ‘Sustainable Development of the Power Sector: The role of project management.’
Nnaji said, “We are in the development phase. We started work on the project in January 2013 and by the end of this year, we will reach financial close, when all the agreements will have been close and banks agree to put down money for the commencement of construction.”
He said it would cost about $1.5bn to build a 1,000-megawatt power plant in Nigeria.
According to him, it costs about $1.3m to build a megawatt of electricity in Nigeria, compared to $500,000 in countries such as the United States.
According to the former power minister, gas supply agreement, gas transportation agreement and power purchase agreement, among others are very critical in the development phase of a power project.
He stressed the need for sustainable development of the power sector, which he described as being able to have a robust way to produce, transmit and distribute electricity.
“We need to diversify the sources of power, and renewable energy is one way, but it has limits. We have not touched coal; we have a lot of coal.”
“The US produces about 40 per cent of its one million megawatts of electricity from coal, while China produces 60 per cent of its electricity from coal. We have coal here but we are not making use of it. Even the natural gas that we have, are we really producing the gas? It is certainly not enough.”
Speaking earlier, the acting Head, Department of Building, Dr. Olumide Adenuga, said the university’s project management programme was conceived to meet the project management challenges of increasingly large and complex projects.
