POWER SUPPLY: IT WILL ONLY GET BETTER FOR ABUJA RESIDENTS, SAYS OKWUOKENYE, AEDC HELMSMAN
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Engr. Chijioke Okwuokenye |
“The vision for AEDC is to make AEDC the biggest and the best utility company in West Africa. At the heart of all we do is the customer experience. It is about making the customer a satisfied customer. We believe that if a customer is happy and satisfied, he will pay.” Chijioke Okwuokenye, MD/Chief Executive Officer, AEDC
The allegations by some residents of the Federal Capital Territory that personnel of the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company AEDC, are engaged in negative acts such as racketeering, has been debunked by the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of the organization, Engr. Chijioke Okwuokenye.
Engr. Chijioke Okwuokenye, an astute leader with results driven passion for positive results in an interview with Naij News Alert recently, described the allegations as false stressing that it was unappreciative of the committed efforts of the personnel of the AEDC towards ensuring that consumers under its cover areas get the best of service.
According to Engr. Okwuokenye, “Going forward, power supply to the FCT will only get better. I am sure that many people will tell you that they have seen mass improvement in the delivery of service to their areas and this will only get better.”
Speaking on issues bordering on racketeering and purported overbilling of customers arising from the introduction of the new bandwidth and the subsequent migration of customers without commensurate supply of energy, Okwuokenye strongly disagreed with the issue of racketeering.
He stressed that the process of migrating customers to the new bandwidth is very transparent and one that is closely monitored by the regulator, Nigeria Electricity regulatory Commission, NERC.
“The regulator actually monitors the services that we provide to the feeder and, based on that, approves the upgrade or downgrade of such feeders to back the other bands depending on how much of service that we provide to the customer. This does not mean that there may not be pocket of issues that can come up as with all systems. Therefore, a customer could have an issue with his house, personally and the entire area does not have power based on that. However, because he is tied to that Feeder on Band A service, so there can be pocket of issues,” he explained.
He advised customers with challenges to approach the AEDC through any of its channels; Business offices, or On-line channels, call centres, stressing that those issues, would be resolved when presented.
Tasked on the challenges faced by AEDC in its operations ranging from debts owed the company, vandalism, diversion and theft of energy by some consumers and the likely measures to checkmate some of the challenges on ground and his vision for the company AEDC, Engr. Chijioke described it is an economic sabotage.
“Diversions, acts of vandalism and energy theft are acts of economic sabotage but we are dealing with it headlong. We are actually improving on all our monitoring systems, driven by modern technology. The fact is that the intention is to integrate AI into our systems where we are able to understand consumptions, patterns of customers and be able to identify energy theft. The ultimate vision is to move the entire system to a smart grid where you can real time, monitor what is happening on the entire system and be able to identify tampering, vandalism and all that,” he stated.
“The vision for AEDC is to make AEDC the biggest and the best utility company in West Africa. We are doing a lot to achieve that and, there have are many infrastructural improvements that have commenced. There is a lot of upscaling of our staff, which is also ongoing, and I can tell you that we have a staff that is currently in Japan learning under Japan International Cooperation Agency, JICA on how to integrate technology into our system.
He disclosed that the AEDC is involved in partnerships with agencies like the Nigeria Electricity Management Services Agency, NEMSA and NAPTIM to train its staffs in new technologies. “As we all know, there is need for a lot of upscaling. There are ongoing partnerships to train our staffs on new technologies because there is a lot of of ongoing upscaling and training required in terms of customer engagements, customer service and many more because, at the end of the day, it is about satisfying the customer. That is the driving point of most of the improvements we are undertaking.”
“Yes, we need revenue to do this and there is a lot of focus on improving our performance in terms of revenue collection and at the heart of it all is the customer experience. It is about making the customer a satisfied customer. We believe that if a customer is happy and satisfied, he will pay. This is what we are trying achieve.”
Asked to respond to reports of approval of issuance of new prepaid meters to consumers in order to address the complaints of estimated billings by DISCOS across the country, the AEDC helmsman noted that, though generally, meters are free. Okwuokenye pointed out that, customers who currently pay for meters in the MAP meters provided scheme is actually free to the customer as the customer is only advancing us the money.
“We we are going to pay back the customer using “energy token” over a period. Therefore, metering generally or, in essence is free. We have a number of metering schemes coming out that the customer does not need to pay a dime. One of such schemes will kick-start before the end of this month of December 2024. It is our MAAF Meter Deployment and Meter Asset Fund deployment.
“Under the MAAf Scheme, we are bringing in about 17,000 meters and the intention is to close out the metering gap on our Band A areas. We have a systematic way of wanting to do this. We will close out the Band A and ensure that the customers under the Band A are getting the required power and that they are satisfied and from there, expand to other areas. With these 17,000 meters coming in, this December, we will be able to close up our Band A areas”, he said.
“We are also working on a scheme to bring in 200,000 meters which will kick off in the first quarter of 2025 which is fully driven by AEDC. Under that scheme, we believe that we should be able to cover the metering of most of the capital cities around us.
“Other schemes will be unveiled in 2025 in collaboration with the government and the World Bank. We have the Presidential Metering Initiative PMI scheme. We created these schemes towards ensuring that we are able to cover the metering gap in Nigeria, one hundred per cent. AEDC is at the forefront of driving these programmes and we are fully embracing it. We are working closely with the government and agencies to ensure that our customers benefit from all these schemes.” He stated.
Speaking on the pattern of distribution of the 17,000 meters, the AEDC managing Director disclosed that, “it is been driven by a cost benefit analysis. Like I stated earlier, the main focus of the 17,000 meters is the Band A customers and, these are customers that pay high premium tariff and as such, it makes no sense billing them on “estimates” so we tend to ensure that they are properly metered so that they are happy paying what they need to pay for reliable service. From this point, we will move down to Band B.” he clarified.
Reacting to demands for the construction of mini solar power grids in some its coverage areas, particularly areas such as the Idu Industrial Area and other strategic areas, Engr Chijioke Okwuokenye said; “In building an IPP, one of the major components required for it is gas and the unavailability of gas within the Abuja metropolis has been a big challenge.”
“There have been talks on the completion of the Abuja-Kaduna-Kano, AKK pipeline project. We are presently in discussions with the contractor working on the AKK project so that we can quickly get gas into Abuja so that we can start roiling out IPPs. However, we are not saying that because of this, we will sit down and do nothing. There has been a lot of work ongoing in bringing renewable distributed power. Therefore, in the absence of gas, we are looking at using solar; distributed solar.
“We just closed out a Tendering for the deployment of solar generation across the eleven clusters under our network. With that, we are sure that we will be able to provide areas such as Idu, more reliable power. There is one of such projects that we are also targeting. We are looking at solar as an alternative to the gas fired IPP that we initially planned for the clusters.” He disclosed.
Responding to enquiries on the AEDC’s strategies to improve on Corporate Customer Relations with the purpose of improving customer bill payments and protection of network infrastructure, Ekwuokenye revealed that, “AEDC is currently migrating to a new Revenue Management System that will help address these issues.
“That is one of the reason for some of the hiccups that we had recently with vending, activation of new customer meters and all of that. It was because of the migration to the Grid system. Nevertheless, with this migration, we are going to bring in a robust Customer Relationship Management CRM and with this; our customers will have real time engagement. Therefore, when the power is out, we will be able to notify you when to expect the restoration of electricity.
“It is going to be robust system because at the heart of it, all we do is customer satisfaction. With the CRM, the customer is going to have self-service portal. We are going to have the AEDC App where the customer can go pay, have direct communication with us, have direct chat with our Customer Care Centre, see the status of his service, the Band of his meter and everything. In fact, he will have access to his performance and it will equally give us direct contact with our customer and allow us push out information on real time. These are some of the expected derivable of the new system that we are working on deploying soon.
“At the heart of our transformation, it is going to be technology driven. Therefore, it is going to mean a lot of investment going into technology to make sure that we are able to bring in, reliable and quality service to our customers.” An enthusiastic Chijioke Okwuokenye stated.
Speaking on the plans for the Abuja Disco to actualize NERC’s order for 30% Renewable Energy in its energy mix, Engr Okwuokenye disclosed that “the recent Tender Exercise by the AEDC was for 11 Feeders to deploy embedded generation across them which I said was renewable energy; solar powered. As I said, it is the alternative that we are looking at for now, for the gas project that was targeted for Idu. Therefore, we are running with this order and we are sure of complying. Very soon, we will be signing the contract for the deployment of our renewable generation plant.
“This will not only bring in renewable solar power, it will reduce our carbon footprint, it will also improve power reliability and in the same vein give us the opportunity to renovate and improve our distribution infrastructure. We will also be looking at that opportunity to collaborate and deploy more meters across our franchise areas. So, for us, we are looking at a holistic solution that will both address the regulators requirement and equally the issue of customer satisfaction.”
Responding to questions relating to the directive by the regulator; NERC that Discos novate from NBET and get into bilateral agreements with Generating Companies, GENCOS, Engr Okwuokenye revealed that the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company, AEDC was one of those Discos that was ready to do this.
“We had signed all of our bilateral agreements with all of our generation partners, however, because of some technicalities that needed to be cleared out, the unbundling of TCN with NIISO; the independent system operator which all had to be resolved before we can go live”, he stated.
“There has been some slow down, for now, in implementing these. However, we are fully ready and once NERC gives approval for us to proceed, Abuja Disco will be going fully on bilateral. We think it is a good thing and it is the best way to go. Therefore, we are fully prepared to do this.” He said.
On the recent blackouts/outages been experienced in the federal capital territory, he disclosed that the issue had to do with the collapse of the national grid. The issue of the grid collapse is due to acts of vandalism, which we have also suffered. It is a combination of a number of things. The good thing is that we understand the issues and we know what they are. As such, we are putting in place, a lot of mitigation to ensure that, going forward, these issues do not occur.
“One of the things that we are doing is to make sure that our distribution becomes smarter so that, whenever there is tampering or vandalism, we will be able to quickly catch up with it and resolve it. Therefore, AEDC is aware of what the challenges are and we have a team that is well equipped and capable of dealing with them.” Engr Okwuokenye stated.
“My assurance would be that, going forward is that, power supply to the FCT will only get better. I am sure that many people will tell you that they have seen mass improvement in the delivery of service to their areas and it will only get better in doing this,” he concluded.
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