Nigeria’s electricity grid: Time to stop normalising abnormality

As of last Saturday, October 19, 2024, Nigerians had endured the third blackout of the national grid (commonly called a “grid collapse”) in less than seven days. A grid collapse in an electricity system is said to be the equivalent of a heart attack in a human being. Veterans of established electricity system operators have no experience of Nigeria-style grid collapses because they have not normalised abnormalities as we in Nigeria have done.

Nigeria’s national grid has for many years suffered from vandalism, poor maintenance of equipment, and the global oddity of manual control instead of utilising modern grid management tools. Today, Nigeria’s single interconnected national grid lacks balance and, ironically, is now burdened by additional energy supplied by recently commissioned new generation capacity. Paradoxically, the national grid has become weaker, and, in these circumstances, the recent system collapses were inevitable. So, the announcement by the regulator, NERC (which really should have been made by the Transmission Company of Nigeria, TCN), tracing the most recent collapse to an explosion in a transformer at Jebba Transmission Station only masks the whole truth.

“The fact is that this explosion was the inevitable consequence of serial neglect by TCN’s Transmission Service Provider Division, which is responsible for grid construction and maintenance.”

The fact is that this explosion was the inevitable consequence of serial neglect by TCN’s Transmission Service Provider Division, which is responsible for grid construction and maintenance. This in turn created a cascade of circuit breaker trips exacerbated by weak transmission lines. These failures in turn overwhelmed TCN’s System Operations Division’s manual grid management system, which is hampered by the absence of modern ICT-driven SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) and other grid management tools. This is the historical template of Nigeria’s grid collapse.

Readers may wonder why we have referred to TSP and SO and not simply to TCN. This is because in seeking a solution to this perennial affliction, the time has come to pinpoint and drill down with precision to the root causes of the problem. The engineering failures that constitute a grid collapse are the consequence of policy, regulatory, and management failures that, until very recently, had been allowed to continue unabated. The truth is that the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), with its present corporate governance and management structures, is no longer fit for purpose. The Nigerian electricity sector will experience neither growth nor development beyond its present suboptimal state unless TCN is comprehensively unbundled into its two constituent parts and these parts are allowed to be owned, operated, and regulated as two separate corporate entities with their respective sets of owners, stakeholders, and corporate/operating mandates. If the status quo remains, a day will come, sooner rather than later, when, as with all heart attacks, another system collapse will occur and the national grid will refuse to restart.

Read also: Explainer: Why Nigeria’s national grid collapses frequently

Very few Nigerians outside the electricity industry realise that, as a corporate entity, TCN is the holder of two separate and distinct electricity licenses issued by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC). One is the TSP license, and the other is the SO license. For various reasons, the TSP side has dominated TCN, and the massive funding that has gone into TCN has been spent largely on TSP functions—building lines and substations, many times in suboptimal locations for purely political reasons, resulting in wasteful energy flows. The SO Division has perennially suffered from poor capital funding to enable efficient and reliable grid operations. It is this unfair preference and the lack of access to its own independent management and funding that have made the SO’s already tough manual grid management responsibility even more difficult than it is ordinarily. What may have been good in 2006 is clearly no longer good in 2024.

Imagine these analogies. Readers would be aware of the Nigerian Aerospace Management Agency in the aviation sector; the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System in the banking sector; and the Central Securities Clearing System for the capital markets. These specialist entities serve as the central nervous systems of their respective sectors. They were created as mutually owned, not-for-profit entities separate from the players and market participants in their respective industries. In Nigeria’s electricity sector, it is the failure to unbundle TCN and corporatise its TSP and SO businesses that is one of the primary reasons why, despite the massive investment in high voltage transmission hardware, catastrophic system collapses continue to occur due to poor maintenance, poor physical asset security, and poor grid operations management. These factors have contributed significantly to the grid-connected electricity sector hardly witnessing any growth in the past decade.

Until very recently, there was no hope that much would change. However, with the enactment of the Electricity Act, 2023, and the express mandate in that Act on the Minister of Power to unbundle TCN into its two constituent parts, there is reason to expect the long-awaited reform of TCN. The commitment demonstrated by the National Council on Privatisation (NCP), chaired by Vice President Kashim Shettima, and the Minister of Power, Chief Adebayo Adelabu, to implement the unbundling of TCN must not be allowed to flag or be defeated by the proponents of the status quo inside TCN. Unbundling TCN is by itself not a silver bullet that solves every problem in one fell swoop, but it is the beginning of implementing permanent engineering solutions that establish the foundation of the sustainable development and growth of a commercially viable Nigerian electricity sector.

The recent directive by the NCP to create an independent system operator for Nigeria is the vital first step in the unbundling of TCN. It should be accompanied by the simultaneous creation of a transmission service provider company that is properly structured. It is not enough as has been done to merely rename TCN as TSP and try to continue business as usual. This is not what the NCP’s directive or the statutory mandate in the Electricity Act require. The NCP and the Minister of Power, the latter on whom directly lies the statutory duty, are obliged to ensure that the unbundling of TCN is comprehensively designed and systemically implemented in a way that takes cognisance that the transmission grid is a living organism that must be carefully handled with the highest degree of professional care backed by firm political commitment to end the bad old days of failed grid construction, maintenance, and system operation practices.

We are convinced that the VP Kashim Shettima and the NCP, including the Minister of Power, are indeed focused on ensuring that the mandated reform measures are successfully implemented in TCN. We urge the authorities to resist the natural tendency to fall back on business as usual. It is clear to us, and we hope to these authorities, that even as reform actions are resolutely pursued, measures must be simultaneously taken to immediately repair the serious infirmities in vital parts of the national grid and physically secure its vulnerable parts against attacks by bandits and terrorists. This is, however, not the time to allow the status quo to remain.