Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission Meets With Stakeholders Over Grid Instability 

The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) has initiated a public hearing with Stakeholders on critical issues relating to the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry to address the recent grid instability in the country.

The resolutions came at the heels of the recent experience of several power outages due to incessant grid disturbances, including two incidents on October 14 and 19 and also the October 21 incident that left the Northern region of the country in total blackout.

The event which held in Abuja, the nation’s capital, brought together Stakeholders from across the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI) and and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs).

NERC Management welcomed submissions from various stakeholders, who were invited to express their views on the national grid instability as speakers at the engagement blamed TCN’s poor operation and inadequate funding as major causes of the recurring grid disturbances being recorded in the country.

During the hearing, the Chairman of NERC, Sanusi Garba, stressed the need for a change of narrative in the Power sector.

According to Garba, the Commission is passionate about identifying short term and medium term action following the public hearing and also the submission that would be received after the hearing.

“Today, we are also very much passionate about identifying short term and medium term action that we need to take following the hearing, and also the submission that will be receiving”

“Clearly, the issue of mental culture has been repeated and repeated by many of the participants here,but we did, from our own intervention, express our concern about TCN not optimizing its own utilization of scarce resources”

” So we’ll look at the PIP again and make sure that some of the urgent things that we need to do today to mitigate the risk of this story of system collapse, a national embarrassment is the story of the past”

He disclosed that there have been contributions about enforcement of the Grid codes, especially by the system operator, stressing that the industry provides significant powers on the system operator to enforce those codes.

“and we make sure that the system operator, even prior to the unbundling, actually enforces those regulations and codes on all participants, not only in general, repeated reference to free Governor control. And so there’s so much that used to be done in terms of compliance, there have been also references to spinning reserve”

“The commission is not Avast to providing resources to providing spinning reserve. In fact, the market operator did mention that he is sitting on 30 billion to procure spinning reserve. And if this is identified, although the critical thing we need to do to make sure that there’s more stability of the grid. Then, obviously, you’re not a banker, you are to use that money for the purpose it was meant for. If there is any indication of adequacy resources to do it, revived back to the commission and see what can be done” he said.

Giving further report of the public hearing, Garba said ” hopefully we’ll be able to work very closely with our external parties, TCN and so on, to make sure, not only in the plants, but also we begin to think of replacing all those assets that you inherited from Nigeria Detal Authority, whether it’s 20 or 30 or 40 years old, so that we don’t operate the industry waiting for the next instability, for a national blackout”

“We would engage credible engineering teams and to see how this can be efficiently done” he said .

“We have also taken time to explain what the commission is doing from the regulatory perspective, in terms of ensuring that some funds are available to do priority and impactful projects in TCN/and if there are concerns or changing priorities, we are very much open to listener to TCN to do the right thing with the money that you already have”

Speaking earlier, TCN’s Executive director Independent System Operator, Mrs Nafisat Ali attributed the system instability to multiple reasons saying over 3.2 billion naira would be needed for spinning reserve and other maintenance of the national grid monthly.

“It’s a culture in Nigeria, because the truth is that these cuts across the entire value chain. We have this culture of until this thing stops working, I will not stop using it. So we have a culture, we have to determine whether we want to change it or remain there. But if we’re changing it, you also think about cost”

There’s need to check settings, body schemes, which may not necessarily be the same across board, there has to be coordination between generation transmission and then transmission and distribution; otherwise, we keep having these trippings that you can’t even analyze them”

We need to improve on Reliability centered maintenance rather than break down. And lots of critical equipment we’ve talked about that we need certain equipment in certain locations, transformers and transition lines, are limitations in some places, and inadequate SCADA and Communication equipment is a huge problem” she said

“Particularly to the system operator, inadequate voltage compensating devices in certain locations is needed as well. I remember during the event of, I think, 14 because of the unavailability of compensating device along the route, it created a delay in during restoration. So frequent operation of circuits causes stress damage to equipment, thereby increasing need for number of maintenance” she stressed.

” i remember during one event this year, the a message was sent on my phone that the feeders has tripped and they had no choice than to run down generation to about 1009 or there about something, and it was very uncomfortable. What kind of system are we running?

The Association of the power generation companies said that Nigeria has recorded 162 cases of grid instability from 2013 till date.

The Chief Executive Officer, of the Association, Joy Ogaji, speaking at the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission’s public hearing explained that rom the association data taken from 2013 till date the grid has collapsed 162 times,”

Ms Ogaji said that the level of frequency fluctuation and frequency crippling on the grid cannot be cured by a free governor mode of operation alone.

“Before the grid code specified or the switch is up to like four. But we have done investigation and found out that sometimes the cripple is well over four, even up to ten, that is eating into somebody’s generation that would have fetched them money”

“I believe that putting a spinning reserve and the free governor mode side by side can cure the volatility on the grid, because research shows that about hundreds of steel mills operate on our grid and we know what steel mills does to frequency,” she said.

Olusola Akintonde