Uche Cecil Izuora
Government is firming up the hitherto inefficient grid system with approval to build a new Eastern-Western electricity grid as part of efforts to address Nigeria’s recurring power grid collapses.
The Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, disclosed this at the recent HBSAN energy conference in Lagos, where he outlined plans to address longstanding weaknesses in the country’s electricity transmission infrastructure.
Tegbe said the government is preparing to begin the procurement process for the projects, adding that Nigerians would begin to see their benefits in two to three years.
He revealed that the government has started a technical audit across the entire country to understand the issues with the power sector and to know what should be prioritised.
“We have clustered Nigeria into three energy zones. The first one is the one that demands 50 per cent. If you fix Lagos and you fix the Abuja corridors, you’ve solved more than half of the problem of Nigeria. Because you can’t do that alone based on operational efficiency, you also have to build out your grid.
The President has approved that we commence the process of building out the grid: East and Western grid. We’re going through the procurement process, but it’s something you’ll see the benefits in two to three years,” the Minister said.
The minister said the technical audit of electricity infrastructure is to identify faults and determine which facilities require urgent repairs or replacement.
He said the exercise was intended to ensure that interventions addressed the actual causes of problems rather than directing funds towards the wrong equipment.
“We have started a technical audit across the entire country to say where do we have issues, and what issues specifically do we have. I don’t want to fix transformer issues where I have conductor and relay problems. I don’t want to fix insulators where the challenges I actually have are towers. So, we will finish that technical audit in the next couple of weeks. When we finish it, we then target our prioritised areas,” he said.
Tegbe attributed some of the challenges facing the transmission network to the age of its infrastructure, saying certain facilities dated back several decades.
He maintained that some transmission towers and lines were inherited from an era when the Electricity Company of Nigeria operated before the National Electric Power Authority.
“This government has inherited a problem of 50 years. Before I became the Minister of Power, honestly, I used to think that everybody in the power sector just didn’t know their left from right. But the reality is, some of the towers have gone down with some of the transmission lines there.
“When I went to the site, I saw some of them carrying the logo of ECN. Many people in this room might not know what ECN is. ECN predated NEPA. So, some of these things were built 50 years ago. That is the reality,” he stated.