Samuel Bello, Abuja
A report from the National Bureau of a Statistics has revealed that about 4 million electricity consumers out of the over 7 million users in the country are billed using the estimated billing method generating serious complains from consumers of electricity in the country.
The NBS disclosed this in a just released report titled “Power Sector Report: Energy Generated and Sent Out and Consumed and Load Allocation (Q4 2017).
According to the data, as at the last quarter of 2017 about 3.45 million customers representing representing 46.16 percent of out of the 7.48 million customers captured nationwide by the 11 Distribution Companies (Discos) are billed using the prepaid meter system.
The Bureau further revealed that the daily energy generation attained a peak of 105,152 MWh in December 2017; with a total average of 94,627 megawatts per hour (MWh) of energy generated daily by power stations and out of this, the thermal stations generated 84,026 MWh, while hydro stations generated 21,126 MWh of the total power generated during the period under review.
A further analysis of the report shows that the lowest daily energy generation of 73,246 was attained on 18 October 2017 as thermal stations generated 55,941 MWh, while the hydro stations generated the remaining 17,305 MWh, the report states.