•  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.