Lafarge 40mw electricity transfer to national grid at advanced stage

The proposed transfer of 40mw to national grid by Lafarge Cement Wapco plc to boost electricity supply in the country is at advanced stage. The company said the bridge connection facility and the transformer to export the electricity are almost ready.

Speaking with BusinessDay recently in Lagos, Lanre Opakunle, general manager, Independent Power Projects at Lafarge, said the transformer would be cleared soon from the ports and installed for the transportation of the light to national grid for onwards distribution to discos.

Presently, Lafarge generates 90mw of electricity at its Ewekoro plant, which produces 4.5 million tons of cement but uses 50mw, hence the need to export the excess to the national grid.

Asked whether the company would retrieve its power from national grid if it expands capacity at Ewekoro, which would need more power, Opakunle said the company with about 3,000 employees would provide additional power for its use.

He said today across the different sites, “we have 233mw of power in them. We use a lot of power. In the past we saw that power was a restriction to our ability to satisfy the needs of the customer. So, what we did was to start putting power plants on each of our site.”

The electricity sale arrangement from independent power generators was part initiatives by Nigeria Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) to make up for the supply shortfall.