By Thompson ABISOLA
Dr Joy Ogaji, a power expert says independent and transparent regulation of activities of all operators in the electricity value chain is key to addressing challenges in the nation’s power sector.
Ogaji, an Executive Director, Association of Power Generation Companies (APGC), said this in a document emailed on Wednesday in Abuja.
According to Ogaji, the major challenge in the sector is inadequate corporate governance, as the success of private electricity market is hinged on an independent and effective regulator.
The expert said that the Electric Power Sector Reform (EPSR) Act rightly provided for the establishment of an independent regulator, independent of government and market operators in order to inspire confidence of stakeholders.
She said given the prospects in the sector, there was the need to address a lot of regulatory issues, heightened by lack of respect for contractual agreements in the sector by operators.
Ogaji also advocated an urgent review of all the prevailing policies, orders, market rules, Multi Year Tariff Order (MYTO) codes, operating procedures and contracts in the sector.
She urged full operationalisation of Eligible Customer regime by ensuring that all contracting hurdles were done away with.
Ogaji also stressed the need to conduct a viable and independent stress test on the generation, distribution and transmission capacities to enable sector operators plan proactively and build the sector.
According to her, it is also important to proffer a pragmatic solution by also providing local, foreign guarantees for operators to access facility from the World Bank and African Development Bank.
This, Ogaji said would help deal with systemic or market risks such as regulatory risks, gas supply risks, and revenue risks among others.
She called for a guaranteed payment plan for generation companies to enable them improve generation and implement expansion plans.
The expert said it was important to address the low collection efficiency and a corresponding lack of significant investment by DisCos in metering customers to improve their collection efficiencies.
“We must address high distribution and non-distribution losses across the distribution and transmission value chain, create market confidence and ensure the viability and credit worthiness of the power sector.’’
She called for effective implementation of all market agreements and firm monitoring and enforcement of the rules by the regulator on all market participants.
“All players in the power sector value chain should be treated equally with fairness and defaulters should be penalised.
