Amid the persistent outage nationwide, the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) has indentified inadequate funding as one of the major challenges militating against prompt transmission of power across the federation.
TCN’s Managing Director, Dr Abubakar Atiku, in a presentation yesterday in Abuja, enumerated other hiccups to include evacuation bottlenecks, menace of erosion of tower bases, violation of transmission right of ways, ageing workforce, lack of adequate technical manpower at various work centres, obsolete substation equipment and overloaded transmission lines and substations.
The list also had control of the grid which is still largely manual, inadequate infrastructure coverage, limited funds for developmental projects, slow performance by contractors, unpredictable energy sources, the gape disparity between energy supply and demand, inadequate telecommunication facilities and control aids which limit operational effectiveness and low voltage in the north due to concentration of power stations in the south.
He explained that the effects of evacuation bottlenecks, which include generation-transmission interface constraints, transmission substation capacity constraints, transmission wheeling constraints and transmission-distribution interface constraints, lead to other problems such as load shedding, voltage/frequency instability, stranded power and system collapse.
Atiku particularly lamented that the inadequate funding of the power agency was seriously hampering its operations, saying of the N30 billion approved for it in the 2016 budget, only N20 billion was released in the second and third quarters of the year.
Source: The Guardian