He spoke on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s long-term target of permanently ending outages in the country within seven years.
El-Rufai told senators when he appeared at the red chamber for screening.
He was reacting to questions pose to him what he would do differently if given the power portfolio.
He said: “The President asked me to work with him to address these problems. And I will do my best to do so.
“Right now, Nigeria has about 13,000 megawatts of installed generation capacity but we hardly do more than 4,000 or 5,000 megawatts, so, to improve generation, the first order of business is to look at what is constraining the full production of electricity from this 13,000 megawatts.
“Why we have 13,000 megawatts installed capacity and only four or 5000 being produced is that many of the generation stations cannot produce because of poor supply of gas.
“80 per cent of our generation is from gas and the balance is hydro. The gas-fired stations often don’t have supply of gas.
“Power stations that have been completed two or three years ago and they have produced nothing because there is no gas supply so that’s another thing that must be addressed.
“We must ensure that gas and power are together. And for this issue of gas supply, which has persisted for over 20 years to be resolved.
“If we’re able to generate 10,000 megawatts today, transmission infrastructure can only do 5000 Maybe 6000 at best, so, the second major constraint to electricity supply in Nigeria is the transmission infrastructure.
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