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- AEDC issues 50,000 prepaid meters in Nasarawa
The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) has said it is working on a new cost-reflective electricity tariff regime that is customer-friendly. Chairman of NERC, Professor James Momoh, disclosed this in Lagos at the 2018/2019 Graduation Ceremony of the Eko Distribution Training Programme (EDTP), where 99 staff of the Eko Disco, who participated in the training, were awarded certificates. He said the new electricity tariff estimate would be out soon for discussion and resolution by all the stakeholders in the industry.
In a related development, the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC) said on Saturday it had given about 50,000 prepaid electricity meters to its customers in the Nasarawa region of its franchise territory. General Manager, Corporate Communication of the AEDC, Oyebode Fadipe, revealed this to journalists at Mararaba, a suburb of Abuja, during the company’s Customer Consultative Forum for Nasarawa region of the company.
NERC said the issue of liquidity, a major complaint of the discos, was a problem of the past, as the commission had already come up with the evaluation of the market itself through enumeration of eligible customers.
“I am saying the cost-reflective issue is being taken care of, with different instruments that are in place,” Momoh said concerning the new tariff regime. “So, it will be good news very soon. The new prices, the new tariff estimate will be out and the customers will be involved in participating in the resolution of the commission. I think we are in the right direction now.”
He said the problem of liquidity was being addressed, explaining, “We have come up with the evaluation of the market itself; we do enumeration, we believe cost-reflective will be very reflective, when there are not too many losses in the system, when meters are installed, because you can’t be charging fees or making numbers up when you don’t really know how many customers are out there. So, the issue of enumeration has been put in place.
“We can’t be calculating prices when there are losses that I should not pay for. With meters now being provided, we now know exactly how much power you are using, and we know how many people are using it, and how much power you have purchased from the Gencos through the transmission providers.”
He added, “We can do a division, we can multiply anyway we want, and at the end of the day, we can surmise and summarise that in actual fact, this is the price we should pay, so give and take, it is a little profit to the discos. A disco is not there to do business for free. So, by the time customers are happy, discos are happy, we as the regulators are happy that we have done our job. Until that is reached, we are not stopping.”
Read Full Story: [ThisDay]