Tuesday 20 March 2012

Kainji hydro-power back on stream – Minister


Four days after it was shut down on account of water leakages, the Federal Government, Monday,  announced that the Kainji Hydro Power Station was back on stream and delivering power to the national grid from its four available units.
The Minister of Power, Prof. Barth Nnaji, who made the announcement, also congratulated the team of engineers for rectifying the problem in a record time.
The minister ordered that the plant be shut down last Thursday, to give room for investigation into the excessive leakage from its dam which threatened to flood the station. Consequently, power from the four units (a combined 233MW of electricity), were cut off from the national grid.
Chief Executive Officer of the Kainji Power Plant, Mr. Yinka Akinwumi, had informed the minister on Sunday that the inspection on the four units had been completed and the plant re-streamed.
However, Akinwumi noted that there was no cause for alarm, as the problem was “normal” because the plant is old (constructed in 1968) and suffered from lack of maintenance and overhaul since it was commissioned 44 years ago.
He, therefore, expressed the hope that there would be an improvement following an ongoing World Bank programme to rehabilitate four of the turbines in the Phase 1 of a two-phased project to rehabilitate the station to reach its installed capacity of 760MW.
Source

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