Blame game deepens as Discos trace grid collapse back to TCN’s transmission lines
Barely one week after the management of Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) blamed the 11 electricity Distribution Companies (Discos) for all the recorded collapse of national grid this year, Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors (ANED), the umbrella body of Discos has disclosed that poor transmission caused all the system collapses.
As at the last count, national grid had recorded not less than nine collapses since January this year, an indication that all is still not well with the 2013 privatization exercise of the Federal Government.
In an interview recently, the Executive Director, Mr Sunday Oduntan revealed that “Poor transmission network protection, a clear job of the TCN has been responsible for grid collapses.
Drawing inference from the latest which occurred on June 30, 2019, at TCN substation in Benin City, he added further that the collapse led to fire outbreak which caused system collapse.
While regretting the way and manner TCN often mix up issues, Oduntan observed that the Discos were available to offer their technical assistance to TCN in order to ensure that national grid collapse is a thing of the past so that power consumers were not kept in darkness.
Recall that the Managing Director of TCN, Mohammed Gur, had linked several grid collapses to the bad business practice by Discos in not evacuating produced powers.
But ANED, in its defense claimed that the failure of the TCN Benin Substation on Sunday was the second of such occurrence in the same city within a year, adding that there was a trend of burnt transmission stations and failed transmission substation incidents in Lagos, Calabar, Abuja, Enugu and Onitsha as of May 8, 2019, due to inadequate transmission protection mechanisms and procedures.
Besides, ANED expressed displeasure over TCN’s practice of arbitrary load dumping on Discos within the periods it was having challenges in managing energy on its grid, causing a myriad of commercial and technical problems.
Oduntan further revealed that these transmission deficiencies of TCN were captured in a July 2017 System Adequacy Report published by the Independent System Operator, a section of TCN.
