Abstract

The growth of a country is largely dependent on the supply of adequate, affordable and reliable electric power. For Nigeria to keep tracks with other developed countries which have exhibited a substantial growth in economic development and grow her commercial sector thereby improving the GDP of the nation, the existing gap between the electric power demand and supply of the country must be holistically bridged. The devastating effects of poor, inadequate and unsupplied power to commercial centers have been estimated in different ways by many studies. These studies evaluated various types of value of unproduced output and outage costs, such as failure to thrive and total collapse of commercial centers as well as loss of revenue which has negative impact on return in investment. It is a common knowledge in Nigeria that most cottage industries/commercial centers rely more on private (off-grid) power generation than the national grid. The diesel and petrol plants are commonly used generators and at times gas turbine plant, with the relative consequence of high cost of fuelling. This alternative source of energy and technology has a direct negative impact on the cost of the daily functionality in terms of production and services of those centers. With the increase in population, electric load demand is on the increase over the years. This research studies a load demand forecast for commercial center of the power sector using time-series as a tool for analysis. The results show that there is need to constantly improve power generation, transmission and distribution network to deliver at least 20,000MW of power to its commercial centers in other to meets the estimated or forecasted power of 19576.05 MW on or before the year 2030.