The Federal Government has approved plans to develop new Eastern and Western electricity grids as part of efforts to address Nigeria’s recurring national grid collapses.
The Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, disclosed this at the recent Harvard Business School Association of Nigeria (HBSAN) energy conference in Lagos, where he outlined measures to address longstanding weaknesses in the country’s electricity transmission infrastructure.
Tegbe said the government was preparing to commence the procurement process for the projects, adding that Nigerians could begin to see their benefits within two to three years.
He also revealed that a nationwide technical audit of electricity infrastructure had commenced to identify existing problems and determine the areas requiring urgent attention.
The minister said Nigeria had been divided into three energy zones to help the government prioritise interventions, noting that addressing electricity challenges in Lagos and the Abuja corridors could resolve more than half of the country’s power supply problems.
“We have clustered Nigeria into three energy zones. The first one is the one that demands 50 per cent. If you fix Lagos and you fix the Abuja corridors, you’ve solved more than half of the problem of Nigeria. Because you can’t do that alone based on operational efficiency, you also have to build out your grid.
“The President has approved that we commence the process of building out the grid: East and Western grid. We’re going through the procurement process, but it’s something you’ll see the benefits in two to three years,” Tegbe said.
He explained that the technical audit was designed to identify faults across the transmission network and establish whether specific facilities required repairs, replacement or other forms of intervention.
According to him, the exercise would help prevent the misallocation of funds by ensuring that investments addressed the actual causes of infrastructure failures.
“We have started a technical audit across the entire country to say where do we have issues, and what issues specifically do we have. I don’t want to fix transformer issues where I have conductor and relay problems. I don’t want to fix insulators where the challenges I actually have are towers.
“So, we will finish that technical audit in the next couple of weeks. When we finish it, we then target our prioritised areas,” he said.
Tegbe attributed some of the challenges facing the transmission network to ageing infrastructure, noting that several facilities had been in service for decades.
He said some of the transmission towers and lines were inherited from an era when the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN) operated before the establishment of the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA).
“This government has inherited a problem of 50 years. Before I became the Minister of Power, honestly, I used to think that everybody in the power sector just didn’t know their left from right. But the reality is, some of the towers have gone down with some of the transmission lines there.
“When I went to the site, I saw some of them carrying the logo of ECN. Many people in this room might not know what ECN is. ECN predated NEPA. So, some of these things were built 50 years ago. That is the reality,” he stated.
The proposed Eastern and Western grids form part of the Federal Government’s broader efforts to strengthen electricity transmission infrastructure, improve network reliability and reduce the frequency of nationwide grid collapses.
