The Organised Private Sector (OPS) has described the recent position of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), that it has concluded plans to increase Nigeria’s wheeling capacity from 8, 000 to 20,000 megawatts by 2022 as bad news.
Recall that in a recent report, TCN said 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.
But a number of leading manufacturing concerns have expressed worries on the long date, saying the upgrade of wheeling capacity ought to have been the key priority of the Buhari administration from 2015 when he assured during his campaign that he will effect 24 hours power supply if elected that year.
They further no confidence even in the 2022 deadline as there has been nothing tangible to support the given date even as power crisis continue to hobble activities in the country.
More details gathered by Business Hilights in the TCN Report showed that “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 report noted.
