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TCN acknowledges seventh grid disturbance in 2024

From Isaac Anumihe, Abuja

The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) has acknowledged a partial grid disturbance this year, making it the seventh in the year.

The General Manager, Public Affairs, Ndidi Mbah, said on Tuesday that the company is making frantic efforts to fully recover the grid.

Although the recovery of the grid commenced immediately, with Azura Power Station providing the blackstart, grid recovery reached advanced stages at about 10.24 am, today when it encountered a challenge that caused a slight setback in the recovery process.

Mbah said in a statement that the slight setback notwithstanding, TCN continued with the grid recovery process, which has reached an advanced stage, ensuring bulk power availability to about 90 per cent of its substations nationwide. Supply, she said, has been restored to the Abuja axis and other major distribution load centres nationwide.

She noted that the partial disturbance did not affect the Ibom Gas Generating Station, which was isolated from the grid yesterday and continued to supply areas in the South Southern part of the country, such as Eket, Ekim, Uyo, and Itu 132kV transmission stations during the period.

Investigation into the cause of the incident will be carried out as soon as the grid is fully restored, she said

Recall that the recent grid disturbance is the seventh this year.

On Thursday, March, 28, the system collapsed at about 16:28 hours. The national electricity grid, centrally managed from Osogbo, Osun State, suffered a collapse at 4:30 pm.

Data from the Transmission Company of Nigeria’s (TCN’s) generation trend showed the grid collapsed at about 4 pm on Thursday and dropped from 2,984 megawatts (MW) to zero in an hour, with all 21 plants connected to the grid ceasing operations by 5 pm.

On Monday, April 15, the national grid collapsed as a fire erupted at the Afam V, 330kV busbar coupler, leading to the tripping of units at Afam III and Afam VI. This resulted in a sudden generation loss of 25MW and 305MW, respectively, destabilising the grid, TCN said in a statement.

On Saturday, July 16, the power plants contributing to the grid began to shut down from around 2 pm, declining to 2,797.16 MW. It further shrank to 1,020.08 MW around 3 pm before drastically falling to 80 MW by 4 pm.

At 6.07 pm on Saturday, power generation had dipped to just 57 megawatts, a significant fall from the almost 4,000 MW recorded earlier about 8 am.

On Monday, August 5, the grid collapsed, with data from the TCN’s generation trend showing that the grid collapsed at about 1:30 pm on Monday and dropped from 3,241 megawatts (MW) to 1,255 MW in an hour.

A UK-trained grid expert, Dr. Idowu Oyebanjo, said that the use of sustainable electricity systems could have prevented the unfortunate collapses of the national grid.

“Generally speaking, there are innovative and sustainable grid power reliability schemes that have become recently available in the world of power systems that Nigeria can deploy to improve grid reliability, and thus save millions of homes and businesses the agony of incessant grid collapse,” he said.

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