Electricity distribution companies under the aegis of Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors have blamed the Transmission Company of Nigeria and the nation’s transmission infrastructure for outages in the country’s electricity supply and consumption chain.
In a statement issued in Abuja on Sunday, Spokesman for ANED, Mr. Sunday Oduntan, also said it was wrong for TCN to classify natural drop of electricity demands at nights as rejection of electricity supply by distribution companies.
Oduntan said that the Distribution Stress Test reports of most Discos revealed average Station Capacity Utilisation of less than 50 per cent due to TCN infrastructural limitations.
To buttress his point, Oduntan cited an instance at Ibadan Disco where about 803MW of its 1,538mw capacity were restricted due to TCN’s undersized 132kV line conductors at Ayede/Sagumu/Ijebu-Ode, aged indoor breakers and transformer capacity limitations.
Oduntan also cited the review of the National Control Centre’s report for September 3 which he claimed pointed that transmission frequency constraint constituted the biggest impediment to the flow of energy for the Discos.
He said, “Of note are the Discos’ legitimate concerns of TCN’s need to stop the indiscriminate load dumping to impractical network areas that make distribution inefficient, unviable and impracticable for technical and commercial efficiencies, due to poor infrastructure construction, substandard materials and inefficient reckless approvals of grid extensions for political considerations and interference during the days of NEPA/PHCN.”
Oduntan urged TCN to quickly upgrade its infrastructures in order to reduce the forced outages it causes electricity distributors and consumers alike.
He also explained that the drop in electricity demand by customers at night was natural and should not be construed as load rejection as the Transmission Company of Nigeria had been doing.
The ANED spokesman said, “What has happened is the inaccurate rendering or misinterpretation by the System Operator of Discos’ minimum and maximum load readings. The SO in its recent allegation of load rejection against Discos wrongly projected the load drop/demand, during off-peak hours (night times) as load rejection.
“This is not and cannot be labelled as load rejection by Discos. Naturally, Discos take and distribute more energy during the day time/business hours than night time when demand is generally low due to lesser demand. The unfair interpretation of off-peak energy data as load rejection is grossly inaccurate and misleading.”
He said the unfair interpretation of off-peak energy data as load rejection was grossly inaccurate and misleading.
Oduntan added that the occasional times Discos had been unable to distribute energy received were directly due to the inadequate TCN infrastructural interface with the Discos.
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