FG’s power deal will curb grid collapse

Siemens Limited Nigeria has said the power deal with the Federal Government will put an end to the frequent collapse of the national grid.

The Federal Government and Siemens AG signed a Letter of Agreement on the Nigerian Electrification Roadmap, now Presidential Power Initiative, in July 2019, with the aim of ramping up electricity generation in the country to 25,000 megawatts in six years.

The Federal Executive Council, on July 29, 2020, approved the payment of €15.21m (N6,940,081,465.20) offshore and N1.708bn onshore as part of Nigeria’s counterpart funding for the power deal with Siemens AG, signed by the Nigerian and German governments in 2019.

The Head of Business Development and Government Affairs, Mr Oludayo Orolu, in an exclusive interview with our correspondent, noted that the Transmission Company of Nigeria had been able to build up capacity at the transmission part of the value chain to over 8,000MW.

The TCN, which manages the national grid, is still fully owned and operated by the government.

The system operator, an arm of the TCN, put the nation’s installed generation capacity at 12,910.40MW; available capacity at 7,652.60MW; transmission wheeling capacity at 8,100MW; and the peak generation ever attained at 5,377MW.

Orolu said, “Our focus is to raise the operational capacity to 7,000MW in the first phase of the project. By operational capacity, we mean what comes to the transmission grid, what gets evacuated to the distribution grid, and what gets dispatched to the consumers.

“So, if you have 7,000MW or 8,000MW capacity at the transmission level and what gets to consumers is about 4,000MW, there is a mismatch.”

He said Siemens would support the TCN to reinforce its assets, upgrade some substations, build new ones as well as upgrade substations and other facilities at the distribution level.

“What we are doing is to see how the various components of that grid can be strengthened to make sure that they are stronger and more stable to give us reliable electricity. So, the objective of this project is to bring an end to those grid collapses,” Orolu added.

The national grid has continued to suffer system collapse over the years amid lack of spinning reserve that is meant to forestall such occurrences.