Nigeria’s power transmission capacity increases to 8000MW —TCN

The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) has said the transmission capacity of the country has increased to 8100 megawatts from 5000 megawatts three years ago.

This, the TCN said is a result of Investments by the Federal Government and multilateral agencies on electricity transmission infrastructure under Transmission Expansion Rehabilitation Programme, TERP, to the tune of $1.63bn.

According to the Managing Director of TCN, Usman Mohammed, who spoke in Abuja on Saturday, “For the Transmission Expansion Rehabilitation Programme, I’ve told you that it is $1.578bn and we have actually have an increase of $55m. So if you add this, it will become $1.63bn. That’s how it is.”

He stated further that in 2015, the capacity of power distribution companies was about 3,500MW, while those of transmission and generation companies were 5,000MW and 4,000MW respectively.

Mohammed said: “As of December 2017, we did a combined peak of 5,224MW. What does that tell you? It tells you that even the capacity of distribution moved from 3,500MW to 5,224MW. For transmission, the capacity moved from 5,000MW to 7,124MW in December last year when we did the simulation. And generation moved to slightly above 7,000MW.

“The good news is that transmission has again moved up. We did a simulation about two weeks ago and the capacity of transmission has moved to 8,100MW.”

Continuing, the TCN boss said that several transformers had been installed across the network but there were not enough lines to carry power to these transformers.

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“This is not adequate. And that is the reason why I can tell you that we have installed more than 2,000MW but what has been added to the grid is only about 1,000MW. Where is the remaining? They are the capacity that we have that cannot be used because there is no line to give them power.

“So what we have decided is that we are going to buy high capacity conductors that can carry more load but with considerable weight. We are looking at using gap conductors that can carry about two and half times the capacity of regular conductors and they are safe”, Mohammed said.

According to him, the procurement documents for these set of conductors had been signed and engineers from TCN would commence work on the re-conducting of the lines, adding that this would increase the country’s transmission capacity to over 10,000MW.

He stated that the Federal Government had taken a decision to recapitalise TCN, noting that the owners of power distribution companies had to recapitalise their businesses in order to make Nigerians get the full benefit of the massive investments in electricity transmission assets.

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