The managing director of the transmission company of Nigeria (TCN), Mr. Usman Gur Mohammad says the failure of electricity distribution companies (DisCos) to upgrade the facilities they inherited from the former parent company, Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) five years after privatization was responsible for the poor power supply across the country.
Specifically, he noted that the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC) is constrained by its inability to upgrade its equipment stressing that with the upgrade of transmission substation in company’s jurisdiction TCN has redundant loads that AEDC is unable to take.
Mr. Mohammad stated this while answering questions from journalists at the commissioning of two new 60MVA 132/33kV Power Transformers in Suleja, Niger State last Friday.
Asked what he thinks the challenges with AEDC is as residents of Federal Capital Territory and it environs still complains of unimpressive power supply despite recent expansion in substation capacity, he said the company is constrained by lack of equipment.
“Abuja DisCo has no constrain, the constrain that Abuja has is within their equipment it’s not within the network.”
He stated that the distribution sub sector of the industry generally have problems, stressing that the government is trying to help out hence the decision to invest N72 billion recently.
Meanwhile, the spokesman of AEDC, Oyebode Fadipe has refuted the allegations stating that the company was currently receiving and transmitting more power to its customers than the appropriate allocation offered the company.
Mr. Fadipe who spoke to LEADERSHIP via telephone described accusations against his company as unfair representation of facts.
“Our position is that the accusations is an unfair representation of facts, AEDC’s national allocation is 11.5 per cent but we have consistently collected 13 per cent so why say we are not collecting loads.
“They are only trying to dictate to us where to take power to but that is not possible. If I supply energy to your house can I dictate to you which room to use it? That I think is not possible,” he said.
However, Mr. Mohammad has insisted that the DisCo must invest in their equipment to expand their capacity as failure will hinder the progress been made in transmission.
“For we in TCN, it is in our interest and in the interest of the expansion we are doing that some investment come into distribution because if you notice that out of the 738 interfaces that we have with the Discos only 421 is completely covered by protection. “Meaning, the remaking 300 and something is not covered by protection which means that any fault from consumers house can hit our transformers and that has led to several of our transformers getting bad.
“If you remember something happened recently in Benin even here in Abuja we have lost two transformers as a result of that therefore it is mandatory that investment have to enter the Discos as that is the only way we can sustain all the capacity expansion that we are doing in transmission and generation,” he said.
On how government intent to solve the problem, he said, “Government has also come up with the distribution expansion plan with N72 billion earmarked for its implementation. TCN is jointly implementing it with the Ministry of Power, and it’s currently going on and there are several other initiatives to fix distribution.”
