By Lanre Adesanya
The Lagos State Government on Thursday reaffirms resolve to make good its desire to offer 24 hours power supply in the state, a move targeted at accelerating the realisation of the state’s socio-economic growth and development.
The Commissioner for Energy and Solid Minerals Mr Olawale Oluwo made the assuring disclosure while in chat with newsmen having successfully defended the ministry’s 2017 budget proposal with the Lagos State House of Assembly Committee on Energy and Minerals.
According to Oluwo, we have a programme we are working on almost eight months ago, it is call the Lagos State Light up embedded programme. The focus is to see how we can begin to take Lagos off the National grid area by area.
“We will work with the Disco, our intention is to guarantee those that will generate and let the disco distributes to homes and businesses.
“This embedded power project will involve government supporting the general power generation and the people who will use the power would pay.
“It has to be area by area because we don’t have the capacity to take the entire state at once. We start with the pilot scheme.
“We choose some areas and power it, because any area we power, we must metre the people otherwise the system will fail. We are on course, nothing will change it and by 2017, we are going to go into the implementation.
“We gave assurance last year (2015)) that Lagos will become oil producing state and that Lagos State will have its own oil and gas company, we have delivered on those two.
“We gave assurance also that we will light up Lagos with street lights, we have done that substantially.
“Now, this year, we are giving residents and business owners that we will begin the 24 hours power supply gradually with pilot areas we are going to select.
“We also give residents assurance that in 2017, we are working with consultants to tell residents all the solid minerals that are present in the state.”
The commissioner added that the ministry intended to put up an application to get an oil bloc for the state in 2017.
Expressing confidence that the State Executive Council would approve the programme early next 2017
According to him, the ministry has budgeted enough to execute the project in 2017.
Commenting on solar energy efforts, Oluwo said, “We are already using Solar power as we speak we generate up to 4 megawatts of solar in Lagos State and we use it to power the schools in the rural areas and public health centres in the rural areas.
“We power about 117 schools and about 14 health centres in the rural areas both in Epe, Badagry, Ojo, Ibeju-Lekkib and Ikorodu.”
He said that the state was dealing with energy giants to execute and sustain the technology.
He commended the lawmakers for being knowledgeable in the three areas the ministry operates such as power, oil and gas and solid minerals.
Meanwhile, the Chairman of the House Committee, Mr Folajimi Mohammed, expressed confidence in the budget, saying it would impact meaningfully on the residents.
It would be recalled that the state has a functional Integrated Power Project supplying electricity to run government business in and around the state secretariat.