Lafarge Africa said on Friday it had applied to Nigeria’s energy regulator for a license to generate 260 megawatts of electricity to supply to the country’s grid.
Nigeria is reforming its power sector to try to put an end to power outages, which means many of the country’s 170 million people only get power for a few hours a day.
It broke up the government’s monopoly on power generation and distribution two years ago by privatizing the industry to try to attract foreign investors .
But power generation has stagnated at about half of total capacity.
Lafarge Africa, Finland’s Wartsila and the World Bank’s IFC agreed in September to build a 220 megawatt gas-fired power plant in the country to boost electricity supplies, at a cost of $400 million.
