National Grid Breakdown By Odiawa Ai
For the eighth time this year, the national grid collapsed again, driving the whole nation into power outage. The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) and the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) have raised alarm over the occurrence of a transformer that exploded at 330kV Jebba Transmission substation. NERC has likewise declared intentions to carry out an insightful formal hearing to spot both the immediate and hidden reasons of repeated grid disturbances and widespread outages. Be that as it may, these breakdowns support existing worries about the structural imperfections in the sector.
It is turning out to be increasingly obvious that experts in the sector are unequipped for stabilizing the power grid, transmit generated volumes with negligible misfortunes and terminate recurrent breakdown. Before now, the normal excuse for breakdown was always that the transmission lines could not wheel the power so generated by the generating companies (GenCos). Eventually, incessant breakdown was attributed to defacing of some transmission infrastructure. Yet, there are more crucial issues to tend to, including scope of unreasonable incentives within the framework and shortcoming of guideline.
Tragically, ten years after the privatization of the power sector, numerous Nigerians have reached the unpreventable resolution that the cycle through which nations such as India, Singapore and a host of other contemporary emerging economies effectively used to reset their electric power challenge is proving too hard to be applied effectively in our domain. Rather than generating, transmitting, and appropriating enough megawatts of electricity to homes and industries the nation over, what we get practically on a daily are excuses from the authorities. Till today, the DisCos that were the recipients of the chaotic power sector reforms have all neglected to put in resources in modernizing and expanding the transmission lines. However, that is not to suggest that the generation companies (GENCOs) have fared better either.
In a report made public last year, the World Bank rated Nigeria as the poorest nation in the world on power supply to citizens, with 85 million individuals not connected to the grid and a deficiency of $26 billion annually. With everyone supplying their own power, Nigeria is quite possibly one of the hardest spots on the planet to do business. Absence of power has limited access to healthcare, education, and other opportunities, including maintaining their businesses for numerous Nigerians. Numerous small and medium scale businesses are incapacitated because of the restrictive expense of generating their own power. Indeed, even the big business ventures, especially the manufacturing ones, are feeling the gnawing impact of energy neediness with consequences extending to all aspects of the economy.
A former Minister of Power, Bart Nnaji, has called on the federal government to resume the signing of Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) with private investors to ramp up electricity generation in Nigeria. As indicated by him, Nigeria currently has about 13,000-megawatt nameplate limit but generates only about 5,000MW due to certain variables that incorporate insufficient natural gas accessibility for the nation’s gas-fired plants, which account for 80 per cent of national grid electricity.
Experts on this subject agree that the main reason why top private investors and investments rarely look towards Nigeria’s power sector may not be all about the shortfall of assets to invest, but rather about the absence of transparency and accountability. As stated occasionally, any nation enthusiastic about feasible financial turn of events and prosperity would not neglect the inescapable reorganization required at the colossal dysfunctional behemoth called TCN.
What the frequent breakdown of the national grid proves is that there are serious systemic issues across the power value chain that need to be tended to.
To address the challenge of the sector would need more than a cosmetic approach.