Consumers Protest Power Outages In Edo

Angry electricity consumers took over the corporate office of the Benin Electricity Distribution Company (BEDC) on Thursday.

However, the management of the company appealed to the protesting communities in the zone comprising Delta, Edo, Ekiti and Ondo to be patient with the company, saying every thing was being done to improve power supply in the zone as soon as practicable.
The company’s acting Head of Corporate Affairs, Curtis Nwadei, who made the appeal while answering questions from the Daily Independent after retinue of protesters besieged the company’s head office, said that the depreciation in the current load shedding was occasioned by the fall in the number of megawatts being generated nationwide.
Nwadei disclosed that as at Thursday morning, the highest power generated nationwide was 3, 409 megawatts with less than 2,500 megawatts being transmitted to the national grid for a population of over 170 million people as a result of fragile transmission line owing to decay.
He said the acute power problem facing the four states being controlled by BEDC was because out of the 2,500 megawatts being fed into the national grid, only 9% which is about 150 to 160 megawatts is being allocated to BEDC for the four states, which requires about 900 megawatts daily to enjoy steady power.
According to him, “I want to appeal to consumers in the BEDC zone not to expect 24-hour power supply in the shortest possible time because apart from the low generation of megawatts by the generation companies, the transmission companies also have their problem as it is difficult for them to evacuate all the megawatts generated into the national grid as a result of the decaying transmission lines that are crying for replacements”.
Nwadei enumerated other problems facing the company as high indebtedness by both states and federal government agencies, including military and paramilitary agencies, energy theft, and assault on its staff by hostile consumers.
He also said since BEDC took over from PHCN, the company has commissioned over 20 injection sub-stations and took delivery of over 400 transformers to improve on its services to the states under its jurisdiction, regretting that the vandalism on its transformers and cables theft by some communities in the zone could also contributed to the of problems facing the company.