The World Bank, African Development Bank (AfDB), Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and French Development Agency are leading other multilateral donor agencies with  $1.57 billion raised to boost Nigeria’s electricity grid to 20,000 megawatts (MW) within the next four years.

The Managing Director of Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), Mr. Usman Mohammed,  disclosed this at a workshop with stakeholders in the electricity industry to review its plan to procure and install brand new supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and electricity management system (EMS) for the national grid in Abuja.

He explained that the sum was raised for the company to implement its Transmission Rehabilitation and Expansion Programme (TREP).

According to him, the TREP is an initiative of the company which had already secured government’s approval designed to steadily grow, stabilise and modernise the nation’s electricity transmission and distribution networks.

The TCN boss clarified: “We established the Transmission Rehabilitation and Expansion Programme (TREP) that seeks to expand and stabilise the grid, and provide necessary flexibility and redundancies consistent with N-1 reliability criteria.

“The objective of the TREP also is to expand the grid to about 20,000 megawatts in the next three to four years, this being done through the implementation of the TREP.

“I wish to tell you that the TREP has so far been able to raise $1.57 billion from multilateral and bilateral donors. And, this is coming from the World Bank, AfDB, JICA, and French Development Agency,

 “Discussion is ongoing also to raise more funds in the course of the implementation of this programme”, the power sector expert added.

Mohammed explained further that TCN was able to attract such funds from the multilateral donor agencies due to its sound management processes that now aligns with global corporate governance standards.

Specifically, he listed some of the components of the processes to include, update of TCN’s annual financial audit reports which had been in arrears from 2010 to 2016 but now cleared; reduction of its bloated top management personnel from 46 general managers to 16 and less than 50 assistant general managers; and the restructuring of its procurement systems to accommodate only competent firms in its contract windows.

He disclosed that in the past year, the management had delivered a 20-year least-cost transmission plan, present to NERC a generation adequacy report which is part of the requirement of the function of system operation, and also completed the company’s audit up to 2016.

Mohammed also hinted that the company had set aside a $65 million budget to procure the brand new SCADA and EMS for the country’s grid to improve the management of the nation’s grid.

He said: “The SCADA is a digital system to control the grid. Most of the time we use manual processes to control the grid, and if somebody does anything in the grid that is supposed to be seen, sometimes it cannot be seen because there is no SCADA, so the SCADA is like a mirror that sees everybody on the grid and anybody that does anything that affects the grid will be seen and punished according to the grid code.

“Its main purpose is to ensure that we have a grid that is functioning properly, and become stable and modern.

 “The budget now is about $65 million, but when we do the tender, we don’t know how much it would be. The previous one that we did was about $40 million but this money is provided under the NETAP (Nigeria Electricity Transmission Access Project) which is financed by the World Bank”, Mohammed added.

On why attempts to install a SCADA in the grid failed, the TCN boss pointed out that“the scoping was not done properly because it did not anticipate expansion and so when the NIPP projects came in, they were not part of the SCADA, all the NIPP projects were not captured and several other projects that came in.”

This is even as he gave an update on the company’s recovery of containers of its projects’ equipment stranded at ports for many years now, adding that so far 655 of the 800 containers have been retrieved and dispatched to their destination project sites.

Mohammed clarified further that 145 of the containers were yet to be cleared, 75 were already undergoing clearance processes, while another 70 containers were auctioned and with the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS).