The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) says it has restored the national grid after a collapse Wednesday caused nationwide outage which lasted till Thursday with pockets of outage subsequently.
Upon the grid restoration, the highest power generated was 5,090 megawatts (MW) on Saturday; it was 4,129MW as at 6am on Sunday, TCN record shows.
The Managing Director of TCN, Mr Usman Gur Mohammed in a briefing, weekend said the company has procured 250MW spinning reserve to cushion future system disturbance and has written to the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) to quickly approve the implementation.
Explaining the cause of the recent collapse, Mohammed said, “The reason for the grid collapse was that there was a multiple tripping around Onitsha substation. We are also suspecting that one of the generators went out. We have sent our team of engineers to go and investigate.”
TCN said it has improved the power system stability and that its $1.6 billion donor funded projects nationwide would ensure more efficiency.
TCN also called for urgent commensurate investment in the distribution networks to ensure a stable grid especially during the rainy season when the Distribution Companies (DisCos) suddenly drop huge loads because of rain and storm, adding that it could trigger grid frequency disturbance.
The Head of Independent System Operation (ISO) at TCN, Engr. Mamman Lawal at the briefing said, “So far, we don’t spin reserve to grapple with this, so we often use the manual control method when the frequency becomes high.”
The Head, Transmission Service Provider (TSP) at TCN, Engr. Victor Adewumi said the grid recorded high voltage last Wednesday that shattered some lightning arresters at TCN substations in Jebba, Shiroro and Jos before the grid collapsed. ”We had to quickly restore those equipment first before restoring the grid,” he noted.
