Oscarline Onwuemenyi
20 December 2017, Sweetcrude, Abuja – The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) announced that it has completed over 18 Transmission Project which would add about 1100 megawatts (MW) of electricity to the National grid by the end of January 2018.
The Interim Managing Director of TCN, Mr. Usman Gur-Mohammed, who disclosed this during a tour of some of the Sub-Stations in Apo and Katampe in Abuja and Suleja in Niger State, said that the projects which would be completed and commissioned from December 2017 to the end of January 2018, after which it will begin to re-conduct transmission lines to ensure the added power capacities are evacuated after the first quarter of next year.
He also noted that the projects are being executed under the Transmission Rehabilitation and Expansion Programme(TREP) which seeks to expand the grid to 20,000MW in the next four (4) years.
He said “In line with our strategy, we are completing across the country several projects which would cumulatively add over 1,000MW transformer capacity to the grid before January 31, 2018.”
He added that “The Nigerian Electricity Transmission Access Project (NETAP) which is one of the projects under REP was successfully negotiated with the World Bank on December 8.”
Gur-Mohammed lauded the company for wheeling the highest peak generation of 5,155MW recently saying, “We must work towards a national peak of 6,000MW in the early part of next year”.
Speaking recently in Abuja, Mr. Gur-Mohammed said that the company (TCN) wants to attain 14,000MW under the Transmission Rehabilitation and Expansion Programme (TERP) being financed with about N383billion ($1.064 million) from international lenders.
He also mentioned that the company (TCN), within the last 10 months had added 1,000 MW capacity to raise the wheeling capacity to 7,000 MW and that is much higher than the 4,500 MW capacity the Distribution Companies (Discos) can take, but generation capacity is at 7,000MW now.
He said, “We are working to raise the transmission capacity higher than the 7,000mw because according to the Power Pyramid structure which is the global best practice, when the Generation Companies (Gencos) attain 7,000 Megawatts as they are now, the transmission capacity should be twice of that at 14,000MW and the Discos’ network capacity should be twice of transmission which is 28,000MW, but this is not the case now in Nigeria.”
The Interim Managing director who came from the African Development Bank (AfDB) to head TCN since January 2017 made it known that he had plans of purging the Federal Government’s agency of old habits to have an agency that practices global standards in expanding the electricity grid.
He said the local funding through the electricity market revenue is poor, at below 40 percent which does not support the huge investment plan and this shortfall is because of the Distribution Companies (Discos) poor revenue collection.
The TCN boss said he is ensuring that some past mistakes in projects implementation are not repeated. Some of this mistakes include giving out of contracts to local contractors which do not have the capacity to execute the project and not allowing the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) that have been selected to bring in the equipment and install the equipment themselves.
Some major projects which would be executed under the Transmission Rehabilitation and Expansion Programme (TERP) include the reconstruction of power lines to strengthen transmission capacity, installation of a new Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system as the existing one covers only 40 percent of the grid, construction of two new 330 kilovolt (kV) transmission substations and five 132kv substations in Abuja, and building of 2,400MW capacity transmission line to strengthen the northern transmission corridor.