One of the oldest dams in Nigeria and a major contributor to the country’s electricity generation, the Kanji Hydroelectric Dam has today, burst its banks.
As seen in a video on AriseTV twitter page, the cause of the leakage has not been known and the resultant effect of the leakage is that the country will be losing over 760 megawatts of electricity.
The Kaiji Dam is also the Nigeria’s oldest dams which was built to generate about 500 Megawatts of electricity in 2017 for about 170 million people as was the Nigerian population then.
Located in Kainji, Niger State, Nigeria, the dam started operations in 1968 after the construction was completed at a whopping cost of about $209 million.
The dam had 8 turbines and the water supply was sourced from the neighboring lake Kainji.
The Dam had an initial total installed capacity of 960 megawatts.
The official generating capacity of the dam was 960 megawatts (1,290,000 hp) and after the installation, only 8 of its 12 turbines have been installed.
The 8 turbines, however, reduced the total capacity from 960 megawatts to 760 megawatts (1,020,000 hp).
All the large cities in Nigeria get their power supply directly from the dam and even some of the power generated is sold to neighboring countries like Niger republic.
With this recent incident, the power condition in the country, which have not even been up to the capacity, will again, have very negative output as so many citizens and even, large manufacturing plants which depend on the dam for power supply, will be cut off for the main time.
As at the time of the report, the engineers and technicians are on ground to fix the burst banks.