The foremost German company, Siemens Power, has extended the completion date of the ongoing Nigeria’s Presidential Power Initiative (PPI), expected to deliver 11,000 megawatts of electricity, till 2030.

The Presidential Power Initiative (PPI) is a strategic and systematic approach adopted to solve Nigeria’s perennial problems of unreliable and inadequate electricity supply.

The company says the deal to upgrade Nigeria’s grid would now be completed in 2030.

The power project signed between the Federal Government and German-based Siemens has been shifted to 2030, five years after the original due date because of covid pandemic disruptions and cost overruns.

According to the Head of Business Development and Government Relations at Siemens Energy, Oladayo Orolu, in a recent interview with Bloomberg, said the company is now expected to complete the project by 2030 “due to delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic”.

“When we conceptualized this project in 2018, our plan was within two years we should be done with phase one, but then COVID-19 happened, disrupting supply chains, which meant getting raw materials took longer than before,” Orolu said.

He also said that the three-phased project experienced setbacks due to the delays in starting the first phase.

He also explained that cost overruns also affected the project’s completion, as they expect electricity output to increase by an additional 2,000 megawatts after phase one by 2025, with the objective of phase one to quick fix projects that will free up 2,000 megawatts.

He said: “We currently have 5,000, we are looking at taking that to 7,000″.

“Prices are not at the same level they used to be. Some raw material components costs have been doubled, some are still close to where they used to be, some are just marginally higher”, Orolu stated while explaining the cost overruns.

It could be recalled that in 2019, the Director-General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises, Alex Okoh, on behalf of the Federal Government, signed the agreement, while the Global Chief Executive Officer of Siemens, Joe Kaeser, signed on behalf of Siemens, to achieve 7,000 megawatts of reliable power supply by 2021, and 11,000 megawatts by 2023.