Nigeria’s power crisis is not a secret. But behind the headlines about load shedding and grid collapses, there is an institution producing roughly 35 percent of the country’s electricity that has spent the last two years doing something the sector badly needed: getting its own house in order.
The Niger Delta Power Holding Company was set up in 2004 as the engine of Nigeria’s National Integrated Power Project, the government’s programme to close the country’s electricity generation gap. It is the largest operator of generating turbine units in Nigeria’s power sector, with a mechanically available capacity of about 2,000 megawatts. The problem has never been the capacity on paper. It has been how much of that capacity has actually been reaching the grid.
When Engr. Jennifer Adighije assumed office as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer in August 2024, one of her first actions was a full technical audit of the company’s generation assets. What she found was a collection of power plants running well below their rated output, not because the machinery was irreparable. Maintenance had been deferred for too long, and the response was immediate.
Five dormant turbine units spread across the Calabar, Omotosho, Sapele and Ihovbor plants were revived and returned to service under her watch, contributing an additional 625 megawatts to the national grid. Work is also underway at the Gbarain plant, which has been offline since a fire destroyed its power control module in 2020. Adighije awarded the restoration contract to a Tilt/Schneider Electric joint venture, with the plant expected to return to the grid by the fourth quarter of 2026.
Beyond recovering idle capacity, NDPHC has also changed how it sells power. Following a Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission order directing generation companies to trade bilaterally with eligible customers, Adighije moved to supply electricity directly to large industrial and commercial consumers who could no longer rely on the distribution network for stable power.
The Eligible Customer Programme gives factories and businesses a direct line to NDPHC’s generation output, cutting out the distribution bottleneck that has frustrated industrial operators for years. Phoenix Steel Mills is among the companies that have joined the programme, reporting improved productivity as a result. “Our Eligible Customer Programme gives businesses reliable, predictable electricity so they can focus on scaling operations, not power outages,” she said.
One of the less visible but genuinely significant things Engr. Adighije has accomplished is the recovery of 110 abandoned containers and 216 packages of critical power equipment that had been sitting at Nigerian ports for nearly a decade. The equipment had been procured and paid for. It simply never made it to the plants that needed it. Getting it out required a level of institutional persistence that yielded real results.
NDPHC was honoured as Power Company of the Year at the NAEC Energy Conference 2025 in Lagos, recognition that came as the company was in the middle of executing the reforms that have since produced measurable output gains.
The institution is candid about the constraints it still faces. Close to N600 billion is owed to NDPHC by NBET and bilateral entities, and transmission projects that would allow more of its capacity to reach consumers have stalled over funding gaps. These are systemic issues that go well beyond any single management team. What Adighije has shown is that real progress is still possible even within those constraints.
At NDPHC, the goal has not changed. Getting reliable electricity to the businesses and communities that need it is the mission, and the 625 megawatts recovered from plants that were once sitting idle is what that mission looks like in practice.
Samuel Agboola is a member of the editorial team of TheScript Newspaper
