Not less than N43.28 billion has been committed to the rehabilitation of the nation's power plant in order to ensure the achievement of the 6000 mega watts target of the Federal Government by December this year, the Minister of State for Power, Mr. Nuhu Wya has said.

Wya insisted that government will meet the target set for Nigerians on the achievement of the 6000 mega watts next month, in Kaduna while speaking on the topic, "Federal Government's Target of Generating 6000mw of Electricity by December 2009-A Mirage or Reality," at the joint yearly general meeting of the Kaduna branches of the Manufacturers' Association of Nigeria (MAN).

According to him, following the result of the technical appraisal carried out on the nation's power plants, about N19.57 billion was committed by the government into the rehabilitation of existing facilities.

This, he added was expected to result in about 1500 mega watts in generation capacity.

The minister also disclosed that the sums of N10.21 billion and N13.50 billion were injected into the rehabilitation of the nation's transmission and distribution infrastructure, respectively.

Wya noted that the current state of electricity supply has had a debilitating effect on the socio-economic development of the country, adding that unreliable and inadequate power supply had consistently been identified as the biggest constraint to the conduct of business in Nigeria.

"The electricity sector in Nigeria has been characterised by grossly inadequate generation, weak transmission and distribution infrastructure. The situation was exacerbated by the poor technical and commercial performance by the dominant utility company, PHCN.

"Until the advent of the fast-track National Integrated Power Projects (NIPP), the publicly owned generation assets of PHCN have an average of 30 years. In addition to the old and obsolete equipment, insufficient internally generated revenue has resulted in poor and unstructured maintenance of the assets.

"Generation capacity has also been adversely affected by the well publicised challenges posed by inadequacy and quality of gas being delivered to the nation's power plants.

"Though government has set a target of delivering 6,000mw by December 2009 and 10,000 mw by December 2011, the national grid for transmitting power between major load centres was limited to wheeling only about 4,000mw of electric power, hence the need for the rehabilitation and expansion to meet the set target.

"The security of supply was very vulnerable, because the fragile and radial nature of the network did not allow for alternative means of back-feeding of electricity supply when incidences of vandalization occur. Furthermore, a diagnostic review of the sector indicated that most of the power transformers were overloaded by about 20 per cent, thereby limiting the capacity of most sub-stations to efficiently take up the power allocated to the distribution companies," Wya said.

The minister however, argued that the funding requirements needed to address the nation's power problems would not be sustainable without the full participation and involvement of the private sector.

This he said, was why the Federal Government articulated a vision for the electricity sector in which the private sector would ultimately take over "the commanding heights of generation and distribution of electric power."

He further argued that the new NIPP projects would play a dominant role in attaining the nation's target delivery of 10,000mw by December 2010.

Earlier, MAN President, Alhaji Bashir Borodo expressed regrets that the nation's manufacturing sector had almost been crippled by the epileptic supply of power, resulting in a drastic drop in capacity utilisation from about 42 per cent in 2007 to 38 per cent in 2008.

Borodo stated that energy accounted for almost 40 per cent of manufacturing cost.

He however stressed that the achievement of the 6000mw by the end of this year must be predicated on concrete and solid articulation of the process that would drive it.