Our zeal to make Nigerian grid best unwavering, says TCN MD Abdulaziz

By Chris Ochayi

Despite recent challenges of frequent grid collpses, the Transmission Company of Nigeria, TCN, has reiterated it’s commitment to phase out obsolete equipment with a view to stabilizing the national grid.

Chairman of TCN, Engr. Sule Abdulaziz, who gave the assurance while addressing newsmen on Tuesday in Abuja emphasized on the company’s commitment to deploy modern technologies to address challenges confronting it.

Abdulaziz said the management of TCN was doing everything possible to ensure the grid becomes stable.

According to him, “So we are doing everything possible to make sure that the grid becomes stable. But this cannot happen in one day. There are equipments that are outdated, which we need to change.

“There are some communication equipment also, which will help put them in order before we can achieve all these. But I’m assuring you that we are not relenting. We are working to make sure that Nigerian grid is one of the best.”

Speaking further on how to protect the transition installations from activities of vandals, the MD said the company has concluded arrangements to procure helicopters and other gadgets to monitor the equipment

He recalled that there helicopters that use to go and patrol the lines in case there are fault as as of that time. But with the creation of TCN, all those choppers are no longer in use.

*So there was a proposal we gave two years ago to buy new choppers. So it’s still ongoing. Number one, we need the finances. And number two, the approvals.

But what I want to say here is what we are talking now is vandalism, even if you put a chopper and you identify the fault why it is our engineers cannot move in and affect the job because of the security issues.

“So we need the help of the security forces to make the place safe for us before we can enter and do our job.”

On why is it now he was speaking on this issue, he said people used to forget. We have been talking. We have been doing press releases It’s not only today, it’s only today we calles for press conference, but we have been doing press release to explain to Nigerians what is going on and the efforts we are making to curb vandalism.

*We have been cooperating with owners of the land, that’s with the local people. We have also been cooperating with the security agencies, with civil defense, with the Nigerian police and with the army to make sure that they patrol our transmission line.

*We also used to engage locals, even provide them with transportation and funds, so that if they see anything happen in our transmission line, they will quickly call us.So we are working on that.

On the grid collapse, many of us have gone to various stations to explain this grid collapse. When they happen, is not that TCN is responsible for all the grid collapse, TCN is one managing the transmission network.

“But grid problems can come from many different reasons, as we have explained earlier, the generators, which are the generation companies, if they have problem, and sadly, one or two of their machines is shut down, the frequency will go down, and the system can have disturbances.

“So it’s not just anytime that’s a grid disturbances, it’s DISCOs also on the part of the distribution companies, if they are not talking loads, that also could lead to great disturbances.

“But we are doing our best. We are doing studies. We are going to implement this kind of system to make sure that these thing is reduced. And if you go down to history, you will see that around 2015 the system, plus in Nigeria per annum will be around 17 or 15 times.

“Gradually we are able to reduce this when you come to 2001 2002 almost it was reduced to three. So we are doing everything possible to make sure that the grid becomes stable.”