TCN raises $1.55billion for grid expansion

In a bid to ensure grid expansion, the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) yesterday, disclosed that it has been able to raise a sum of $1.55billion from multilateral donors.

This is even as it revealed plans to achieve transmission capacity of 20000MWs within the next three years.

TCN Managing Director, Usman Gur Mohammed stated this in an interview with newsmen in Kano State.

He said the funding was possible with combined efforts from donor agencies such as the World Bank, JAICA, African Development Bank (AfDB), Islamic Development Bank and the European Union.

According to him, one of the major problems bothering on transmission is the capacity of electricity distribution companies (DisCos) to carry load, hence the need for grid expansion.

“When we came in, we realised that TCN’s capacity to transmit power is actually higher than the capacity the DisCos have and it is almost the same capacity with the capacity of the generation companies, but the issue is that we still some level of flexibility that we need to give to the DisCos and also discovered that there are certain areas where we have significant constraints.

“So we need to raise some money to be able to expand the grid because of the liquidity of the power sector, we discovered that the easiest way we can raise money is through multilateral donors, so we seek the cooperation of the Ministry of power and Finance and they supported us and we are able to raise significant amount of money for us to expand the grid.

“We are working towards achieving 20,000MWs in the next three years and that is what we are doing, we have approached the multilateral donors and we have been able to raise significant amount of money.

“We have raised about $1.55billion which is coming from the World bank, the African Development Bank (AfDB), Islamic development bank and JAICA itself and the European Union is also giving us a grant.”

He noted that most times TCN is blamed for the inadequacies of the generation companies (GenCos) adding that:”power business is a function of generated load and collected load.”

In his explanations, he said; “generated load and the collected load has to balance so if the capacity of the transmission and generation companies has been expanded but the distribution cannot pick load, what we can generate has to be equal to what you can pick which is the responsibility of the distribution companies.”