Nigeria will review the sale of power assets to private investors after they have been unable to improve power supply in Africa’s most populous country.
The buyers of the assets are making technical and commercial losses and only distribute a fraction of existing capacity to end-users, the Power Minister said.
While the West African nation can generate 13,000 megawatts, it is only able to transmit about 4,500 megawatts to the power grid with only 3,000 megawatts of that getting to consumers, Sale Mamman, Nigeria’s Power Minister said Wednesday in Abuja.
A proposal to review the privatization has been submitted to the cabinet for consideration. Companies incapable of running the distributors “should give way to whoever that is ready to come and invest,” Mamman said.
Nigeria, which vies with South Africa as Africa’s largest economy, is still grappling with blackouts despite power privatization seven years ago that promised to fix its electricity challenges. Only 60% of residents have access to electricity and even those still remain plagued with regular outages due to poor infrastructure.
A $2.7 billion debt owed to power producers by the state-owned company that buys their output and resell to distributors, is threatening to undermine their viability and crumble the power market.
Meanwhile,the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) has concluded plans to increase Nigeria’s wheeling capacity from 8, 000 to 20,000 megawatts by 2022.
The TCN disclosed in a recent report that development object of its transmission rehabilitation and expansion program (TREP) is to rehabilitate, stabilize and provide necessary flexibility and redundancies and expand the wheeling capacity to 20,000MW by 2022.
According to the report, “TCN needs to successfully implement the following four-point strategy achieve system frequency control; procure adequate sunning reserve; provide functional supervisory control and data acquisition, SCADA and achieve critical investment in lines and substations.
“TCN established the strategy that compelled generating companies (GENCOs) to install and operate free governor control system consistent with the Grid Code. As a result of stringent enforcement of the rule, TCN achieved the WAPP standard frequency control of 49.80Hz and 50.20Hz for 66% and Nigeria Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) Standard of 49.75Hz and 50.25Hz for over 854% of the time between December 23, 2018 and May 23, 2019.
“However, from May 6, 2019 to date, TCN has been struggling to achieve half the above frequency control performance due to grid instability. The DISCOS’ network lack significant investment and are poorly maintained hence it is difficult to manage the balance between demand and supply due to incessant dropping of load by the DISCOs especially when it rains.”