By Busari Kabirat
The Chief Executive Officer of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), Sule Abdulaziz, has made it known that the TCN should not be hold responsible for the national grid that is collapsing frequently in Nigeria.
This was disclosed by Abdulaziz in an interview with Channels TV’s Sunday Politics, noting that the collapse of grid can be due to many reasons which may be generation, transmission, and distribution systems of the energy.
He said, “TCN is in charge of the grid but if there’s a system collapse, it doesn’t mean that all the problems are from TCN.”
“It can be from generation, it can be from transmission, and it can be from distribution. And some of these also can come as a disaster.”
He stated further that recent grid failure was due to grid disturbances that occurred twice within a week. “We have grid disturbances two times. The first one was on Monday and the second one was yesterday on Saturday.”
Abdulaziz reacting and clarifying the reports of another grid collapse on Tuesday, October 15, were incorrect.
He said: “There are some news that says that the grid collapsed again on Tuesday. That one is not correct. On Monday, we were trying to restore the grid, then we had some setback, and that is when we had to start all over again, but it wasn’t a collapse.”
He added that grid collapse had reduced since 2015 as progress was made by the commission and most of this mentioned grid infrastructures had been in existence over 40/50 years but the commission is working harder to make sure that problems are permanently solved.
However, infrastructure maintenance are managed by generated revenue.
He said, “But if you look at the records, the grid collapse has reduced from 2015. If you have all these records, you will see that from the year 2022, we spent over one and a half years, and there was no grid collapse. So we are doing our best.”
“We know we have to do more, but at least we are getting to know the issues and we are resolving them one by one.”
“So, most of the equipment we are using, some of them are even 50 years old, some 40 years old. So it is not possible for those equipment to work perfectly.”
“Continuously, we build new substations, we buy spare parts and change some of the outdated [equipment].”
“You see, it cannot be done once. It is bit by bit.”
“Most of the funds we are using is from internally generated revenue. There are some projects that are sponsored from the federal budget, but most of the maintenance is carried out by IGR.”
“So what we do every year is that we schedule some maintenance, changing some of the old equipment.”
