Nigeria needs good transmission model to grow power sector

• 6 months ago (2023-10-30)
• David Flin

Africa 303 Transmission 181

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Patrick Udechukwu, a former Senior Vice President of Gas Commercialisation at Genesis Energy , has said that Nigeria needs a good transmission ownership model to improve power services in the country.

Udechukwu said that the Nigerian Government should unbundle the nation’s transmission, bring in private sector investment, and retain the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) as the regulator. He said this would expand the country’s infrastructure quickly and not put more pressure on the public sector capital. “The national grid now has an installed power generation capacity of about 14 000 MW, as a result of the Zungeru plant that came on stream this year. The bottleneck is how much capacity can we wheel or can be transmitted. We have a lot of stranded capacity; we can only transmit around 5000 MW, so going to 14 000 MW of generation capacity is like putting the cart before the horse. We need to critically look at transmission.”