As of last Saturday, October 19, 2024, Nigerians were enduring the third national power grid outage (commonly referred to as a “grid collapse”) in less than seven days. It has been said that a grid collapse in the power system is equivalent to a heart attack in humans. The veterans of the existing electricity system operators have no experience with a Nigerian-style grid collapse because they have not normalized anomalies the way we in Nigeria have.
Nigeria’s national power grid has long been plagued by vandalism, poor maintenance of equipment and the global oddity of manual control without access to modern grid management tools. Currently, Nigeria’s single interconnected national electricity grid is unbalanced and, ironically, strained by the additional energy provided by new generation capacity recently commissioned. Paradoxically, the national power grid is weakening and the recent system collapse was inevitable in these circumstances. Therefore, the announcement by regulator NERC that traces the recent collapse to the explosion of a transformer at the Jeba transmission station (which should have been made by Nigeria’s electricity transmission company TCN) only obscures the whole truth.
“In reality, this explosion was the inevitable result of a series of neglect by TCN’s transmission service provider division, which is responsible for building and maintaining the power grid.”
In reality, the explosion was the inevitable result of a series of inactions by TCN’s Transmission Service Provider division, which is responsible for building and maintaining the power grid. This caused a cascade of circuit breaker trips, which were further exacerbated by weak power lines. These obstacles overwhelmed TCN’s system operations department’s manual grid management system, which was hampered by the lack of modern ICT-driven SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) and other grid management tools. This is a historical template for the collapse of Nigeria’s power grid.
Readers may wonder why I mentioned TSP and SO rather than just TCN. Because in the search for a solution to this persistent problem, it’s time to pinpoint and dig into the root cause of the problem. The engineering failures that constitute the collapse of the power grid are the result of policy, regulatory, and management failures that were allowed to continue unabated until very recently. The truth is that the current corporate governance and management structure of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) is no longer fit for purpose. Unless the TCN is comprehensively divided into its two component parts and these parts are allowed to be owned, operated and regulated as two separate corporate entities with their respective owners, the Nigerian power sector is currently It will not grow or develop beyond its suboptimal state. Stakeholders and Corporate/Operational Authority. If the status quo continues, as with any heart attack, there will be another system collapse sooner or later, refusing to restart the national grid.
Also read: Explained: Why Nigeria’s national power grid often collapses
Few Nigerians outside the power industry are aware that TCN as a legal entity is the holder of two different power licenses issued by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC). One is the TSP license and the other is the SO license. For various reasons, the TSP side is in control of the TCN, and the huge sums of money pumped into the TCN are primarily focused on TSP functions, which are built many times in sub-optimal locations for purely political reasons. Money is spent building transmission lines and substations, resulting in wasted energy flow. The SO sector has always suffered from a lack of capital funding to enable efficient and reliable grid operations. This unfair priority and lack of access to their own independent management and finance make SO’s already demanding manual grid management responsibilities even more difficult than usual. What may have been good in 2006 is clearly not good in 2024.
Imagine these analogies. Readers will be familiar with the Nigerian Aerospace Management Authority in the aviation sector. Nigeria Interbank Payment System in the Banking Sector. Central securities clearing system for capital markets. These specialized organizations serve as the central nervous system for their respective departments. They were established as mutually owned, not-for-profit entities separate from their respective industry players and market participants. In Nigeria’s power sector, failure to unbundle TCN and corporatize TSP and SO businesses has been decimated by poor maintenance, poor equipment, despite huge investments in high voltage transmission hardware. This is one of the main reasons why phylogenetic collapse continues to occur. Physical asset security, poor power grid operations management. These factors have significantly contributed to the grid-connected power sector experiencing little growth over the past decade.
Until recently, we could not have expected such a big change. However, with the enactment of the Electricity Act in 2023 and the explicit obligation on the Minister of Electricity to separate the TCN into two components, there is reason to expect the long-awaited TCN reform. The commitment shown by the National Council for Privatization (NCP) chaired by Vice President Kassim Shettima and Chief Power Minister Adebayo Adelabu to carry out the unbundling of the TCN has been flagged by those pushing for the unbundling of the TCN. They must not be allowed to lose or lose. Current situation within TCN. Unbundling of the TCN is not in itself a silver bullet that will solve all problems in one fell swoop, but it introduces a permanent engineering solution that establishes the foundation for the sustainable development and growth of a commercially viable Nigerian power sector. It is the beginning of
The recent directive by the NCP to create an independent system operator in Nigeria is an important first step in the unbundling of the TCN. This should also be accompanied by the establishment of a suitably structured transmission service provider company. It is not enough to simply rename a TCN to a TSP and try to continue business as usual, as has been the case in the past. This is not required by the NCP Directive or the statutory obligations of the Electricity Act. The NCP and the Minister of Electricity (the latter has a direct legal obligation) will ensure that the separation of the TCN is comprehensively designed in a way that recognizes that the power grid is a living organism and that it must be safe. , there is an obligation to ensure that it is implemented systematically. It will be handled with care and with the highest degree of professional care, backed by a firm political commitment to ending the good old days of failed grid construction, maintenance, and system operations.
We are confident that the NCP, including Vice President Kassim Shettima and the Minister of Power, are focused on ensuring that the mandated reform measures are implemented in the TCN. We urge authorities to resist the natural tendency to return to business as usual. Even if reform actions are pursued resolutely, serious deficiencies in critical parts of the national electricity grid must be immediately repaired and measures taken at the same time to physically protect vulnerable parts from bandit attacks. It is clear to us, and what we expect from the authorities, that this will not happen. And terrorists. However, now is not the time to leave things as they are.
