TCN and the heroes of lines upgrade

The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) is the only company, out of the 18 successor companies unbundled out of the former Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) that was not privatized. And it is evidently the most successful of the lot. Although the company has faced some unprecedented turbulence and had actually walked on thorns at some times in the past, the appointment of a new management in February 2017 and a matching order to re-jig and reposition it, led to its rediscovery and the huge successes that have placed it on the path of giving the country its best possible window to get it right. Prior to the appointment of a new management, TCN went through hell when it was initially conceded to Manitoba Hydro International (MHI) under a 4-year management contract, ostensibly to provide technical and managerial expertise to improve the operational efficiency and overall performance of the company. Regrettably, the contract ended without achieving the lofty objectives which led to the termination of the contract in August 2016. The interregnum between the time MHI handed over and the period when the current management took over in February 2017 did not help either as the company fumbled although due to a glaring lack of the will to reorder it.

This write up is a concerned citizen’s perspective into the new world and the new outlook that has culminated into the hugely success story achieved under the leadership of the Managing Director U.G. Mohammed and a team of very competent, patriotic and selfless engineers who, backed by committed and dedicated field workmen and women who have sacrificed the comfort and luxuries of their homes and offices in order to unveil its ambitious rehabilitation and expansion program under its strategic mission to achieve grid expansion, stability and reliability. The ultimate national objective is to achieve its mandate of rehabilitating, stabilizing, providing necessary flexibility, redundancies and expanding the wheeling capacity of the grid to 20,000 Megawatts. All efforts and the sleepless nights by the entire TCN workforce at all levels were geared towards achieving this rather unattainable goal. As a bystander, I have observed and awed by the unprecedented inroads that have been made by the TCN to address the knotty problems that have stymied progress all these years. My intention is to identify what the real efforts are as the country gets set to see the fruits of the hard work at TCN, and to identify, recognize and encourage the men behind this gargantuan call to service to right all wrongs and set Nigeria on the threshold of stability and sustainability in power transmission and supply. In this regard, the development objective overall is hinged on achieving system frequency control; have adequate spinning reserve, provide functional supervisory control and data acquisition and achieve critical investment in lines and substations.

System frequency control refers to the management of speed at which turbine generators are running at a given time. This is necessary because the national demand, aggregate of all the loads taken by distribution companies and other class of customers connected to the grid is not constant. It is instructive to note that in June 2017, the TCN achieved a frequency control between 49.50Hz and 50.50Hz which is first of its kind in the last twenty years. Spinning reserve on the other hand, is an auxiliary service provided in grid management to meet huge shock that may lead to system collapse. The current spinning reserve of TCN on a daily load broadcast is either 40MW or 0. With generation between 4500 to 5000 Megawatts the expected standard reserve is 450MW representing 10 percent. Management of TCN had established a committee with membership from TCN, generating companies and others to find out reasons why generating companies contracted to provide spinning were not providing them. The committee had established that the tariff for spinning was not adequate and this has, since last year been forwarded to the National Electricity Regulatory Commission NERC. Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) is a system that operates on coded signal over a communication channel. It is a tool for system operations and monitoring for effective grid management. NEPA/PHCN/TCN have all attempted to procure SCADA/EMS/Telecoms three times and non was successful. The current SCADA/EMS was financed by the World Bank but can only see about 40 percent of the network yet with lots of deficiencies. A committee is now working to find the causes of failure on the three past attempts to establish functional SCADA. On critical investment in line and substations the TCN has plans to rehabilitate and expand transmission lines and substations across the country consistent with international standards. TCN is using in-house capacity to install abandoned transformers and associated key equipment in various substations and to also assist contractors complete their contracts or take over terminated contracts to complete them.

The TCN of today is a TCN primed to change the narratives of power transmission to open up the potentials in the country. In this huge objective and the rollout, it is incumbent on me to recognize the invaluable, patriotic, selfless and professional contributions of the men and women that have teamed up with the Managing Director who himself is an all-round square peg in a square hole technocrat, to put Nigeria on the trajectory of rediscovery. Worthy of mention are Engineer M.J. Lawan who is the Executive Director Operations of TCN; Engineer Victor Adewumi, Executive Director Transmission; Engineer I.L. Alimi, General Manager Transmission in Charge of Kaduna Region and Engineer Solomon Uyouk, General Manager Port Harcourt Region. One of the most intractable hiccups TCN faced in solving its initial teething problems was when 800 of its containers of critical hardware equipment were stranded at the Ports. It took the patriotic zeal and ready-to-help disposition of Mrs Dembo to salvage about 700 of them. This singular contribution set the stage for all the successes achieved.

Abayomi Abuja wrote this piece from