Grid Expansion Meaningless Without Recapitalisation of Discos – TCN

• Grid Expansion Meaningless Without Recapitalisation of Discos – TCN

The Transmission Company of Nigeria says the massive investment by the Federal Government and multilateral agencies on the expansion of Nigeria’s power transmission grid will be meaningless if there is no commensurate investment in distribution network by electricity distribution companies.

According to the TCN, “Nigerians will never have electricity if the Discos do not invest in their network” regardless of the billions of naira being invested in power transmission assets across the country.

Sunday Punch reported that investments by the Federal Government and multilateral agencies on electricity transmission under the Transmission Expansion Rehabilitation Programme had risen to $1.63bn, a development that led to a rise in Nigeria’s power transmission capacity from about 5,000 megawatts three years ago to 8,100MW.

But in his latest presentation on works being done in the power transmission sector, the Managing Director, Transmission Company of Nigeria, Usman Mohammed, declared that all the efforts of the Federal Government in ensuring grid stability might amount to nothing if power distributors failed to adequately invest in distribution assets by recapitalising.

He said, “All these things that we are doing by trying to make the grid stable, do you know that only 18 customers are connected directly to our network? So that means the quality of life of Nigerians may not change with respect to electricity regardless of what we are doing.

“Of course, if we don’t do it, there is a problem. If we do it and other people don’t do what they are supposed to do, it is also a problem. Out of necessity we asked the system operator to do a study across the grid recently and we discovered that out of 738 interface that we have with the distribution companies, only 421 are connected directly through our injection substations.”