Zungeru Hydropower Plant To Begin Operation November –Adelabu

The Minister of Power, Chief Adebayo Adelabu, on Wednesday said the Zungeru hydropower plant will begin operation before the end of November.

Adelabu disclosed this at a press briefing on Wednesday.

“Zungeru hydropower is ready. The concession has also been approved by Mr President. So we will start operating Zungeru probably before the end of this month,” Adelabu said.

The construction works on the power plant started in May 2013.

The plant comprises a reservoir at an elevation of 230 metres, and a powerhouse containing four 175 megawatts turbine/generating units for a total rated output of 700 megawatts (MW).

The Nigerian government had in November last year invited investors to bid for the concession of the plant.

The Bureau of Public Enterprise said it was looking for a competent concessionaire to operate, manage and maintain the hydropower plant for 30 years.

In February 2023, the Federal Government announced Mainstream Energy Solutions Limited (MESL) as the preferred bidder for the plant concession.

The BPE said MESL offered a concession fee of $70 million per year, for 30 years.

Adelabu said: “The only thing left in Zungeru is just to complete the rest of the evacuation infrastructure so that the entire 700MW can be evacuated into the transmission grid.

“As it is today, the structure and infrastructure we have there can only evacuate about 300 megawatts so Zungeru is ready as an addition to our power generating capacity, I can confirm that to you,” he added.

The minister disclosed that efforts have always been on establishing more power plants to get power generated.

“I’m telling you if our focus is on distribution, infrastructure improvements, and a little transmission, even with the volume of power we generate today, We are going to double delivery to the doorsteps of consumers.

“What we are trying to do is to de-emphasise the national grid for now and focus on distributed power. So, we can still generate power and get it down to consumers without passing through the national grid.

“We have small dams that can generate between 500 kilowatts to 5 megawatts, we want to focus on that to generate power to identified locations embedded in the distribution network without passing through the transmission network because the capacity of our transmission is still constrained.

“While we concentrate on improving the grid and expanding our capacity, we still want to generate power and distribute it to our people, so that is what we want to do. So our strategy will be wrapped around using micro and mini-grids to supply power,” Adelabu stated.