The Senate Committee on Power on Monday waded into the Incessant electricity grid collapses which have become all frequent in Nigeria’s power sector.
The Chairman, Senate Committee on power, Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe led members of the Committee to the Ministry of Power for an oversight visit to the Ministry and also the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN).
Senator Abaribe said the oversight visit became necessary to find out the challenges that have led to poor supply of electricity to Nigerians and also the reasons for the consistent collapses of the national grid.
Abaribe disclosed that come 29th April 2024, the Committee would convene an investigative hearing into the issue of tariff hike without relevant stakeholders in the sector.
He lamented that some other countries of Africa are making a joke of Nigeria as a generator country, where no one can do anything without having a private generator which is not acceptable.
“When you said you have over 8000MW installed capacity. Since the privatization started is something more of inconsistency, once it goes up to 5000MW, it will come down. And these have happened in the past 20 years. And so we are here, to hear directly from TCN what the problems are and are there anything we can do to using the law to make Nigeria one of the countries that don’t have to pretend on their own installed capacity.
You can see the number of senators that are here which shows that everyone is concerned” he said.
Responding, Sule Ahmed Abdulaziz, the Managing Director of TCN, listed the causes of grid collapses to include vandalization, funding and the absence of SCADA, an acronym for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition; a computer-based system for gathering and analyzing real-time data to monitor and control equipment that deals with critical and time-sensitive materials or events.
In his remarks, the Minister of Power, Chief Adebayo Adelabu, gave insights into the way these challenges is hindering effective operations and stability in the sector.
He identified funding as a major problem in the sector stressing that some 120 TCN projects have been stalled for over 20 years because of lack of funding.
The Minister also stated that vandalization of electricity infrastructures have become more rampant in the North East and South East, adding that some projects that are lying fallow due to lack of funding have been vandalized in the part of the country.
Adelabu also said that reliance on national grid has to reduce, urging sub national, State governments to utilize the newly passed Electricity Act to invest in power in order to provide some form of backup for the grid.
The Minister however, disclosed that the incidences of incessant collapses would soon be a thing of the past as the help has come in form of World Bank interventions.
According to the Minister, the World Bank is currently working with the TCN on a project that would last two years and is expected to be a panacea to the grid collapse as it will see the installation of effective and efficient SCADA system.
