​​TCN targets 15GW grid expansion with $1.57bn funding

The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) which manages the national grid says it is expanding grid capacity from the current 6,000MW capacity to 15GW capacity through funding from international financiers.

At a workshop in Abuja on Tuesday, Mohammed Gur, TCN managing director disclosed that this was part of an initial process for the acquisition of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System (SCADA) and Energy Management System (EMS) for the national grid under a programme tagged Transmission Rehabilitation & Expansion Program (TREP).

Gur said TREP was launched to reposition TCN so it could raise significant funding from the World Bank, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), African Development Bank (AfDB) and other development partners.

Chuks Nwani energy lawyer, told BusinessDay that the funding is a line of credit that would be advanced to the company to assist the implementation of the eligible customer declaration. The facility would enable customers with capacity to pay connect to the grid and TCN would repay the loan based on collections made.

“It is expected to stabilise, expand and provide necessary flexibility and redundancy for a 15GW national grid that meets the needs of all industry operators and their customers,” says Babatunde Fashola, minister Power, Works and Housing in an address at the opening of the workshop, where he was represented by Louis Edozien, permanent secretary, Power.

Fashola said that to achieve this goal, TREP must deliver a functional SCADA and EMS for the use of TCN, as an operator of the national grid, the industry operators as the users of the national grid, the NERC and NEMSA.

TCN has been unsuccessful in delivering a functional SCADA, EMS and telecommunication system due to substations apparatus/control subsystem deficiencies, improper project scoping, unsatisfactory project execution and deficient capacity of the intended users and operators of the system.

Due to this situation, it has been difficult to get detailed national grid operational data by managers, operators, regulators, policy makers, customers and observers in a secure, unfiltered manner.

“Instructions to distribution companies to increase or decrease off-take at trading points is still done manually using ad-hoc communications, available load is still allocated to generation companies manually using ad-hoc communications without acceptable levels of transparency,” said Fashola.

The government is outsourcing the SCADA and EMS system to private companies and now wants to fully optimise use of TCN’s fibre optic telecommunications assets.