Nigeria has faced persistent challenges in its power sector, a critical element for economic development and quality of life. Despite having substantial energy resources, the country’s power transmission infrastructure has struggled to meet demand, resulting in frequent outages and unreliable service.
The Illiquidity Crisis
The Electricity Hub recently spoke to Engineer Steve Olumuyiwa, who is serving an advisory role on Transmission at Nextier and an adviser to the MD/CEO on transmission matters at Niger Delta Power Holding Company Limited. He noted that the significant problem in the grid is illiquidity because there are no funds in the electrical market as a result of the end users not paying for the electricity consumed.
With illiquidity, there are not enough resources in the electricity market to fund the modernisation of the grid. There is also insufficient funding to keep pace with infrastructure building to ensure that the grid continues to meet demand. He stated that the solution is to ensure that the electricity market creates a scenario where the end users can pay for their electricity.
Transmission Challenges: Old Infrastructure and the Need for Modern Technology
Nigeria’s transmission infrastructure requires modernisation and rehabilitation to meet demand and accommodate the various generations necessary for end users. Those end users must have meters because that’s the bottom line.
Olumuyiwa compared the transmission grid to substations connected by transmission lines or cables at different voltage levels. Transmission voltage levels in Nigeria are 330 KV at the top level and 132 KV at the sub-transmission level. Transmission technology is used in many parts of the world, and here in Nigeria, overhead transmission lines and underground cabling are most used. These are very expensive and are only used when necessary.
He noted that the transmission line has to physically run from one physical end to a valid physical geographical territory and then to another physical end. He stated that the implication is that those two physical wires are subjected to different challenges: they go through forests and various places where vegetation could interfere with the structures. He added that the consequence is that faults can happen, including atmospheric, physical, and fire.
The technology deployed must ensure the electricity supply is reliable and qualitative. The grid must have various technologies deployed that ensure reliability and quality delivery. Olumuyiwa called for System protection schemes that identify faults on the transmission line level, the substation equipment level, or the last-mile wire that comes to the consumer. Those wires and faults are Isolated by automatic switching to ensure that the electricity is not shut down.
The system protection schemes have to continuously be improved and modernised and ensure that they are accurate, factual and discriminative in the sense that the protection will not react to something happening out of its jurisdiction of operations, creating confusion and resulting in the system collapsing.
So, protection schemes must be adequately modelled and calibrated, requiring skill sets and engineering capabilities within the transmission operators, both the network and the system operators, to ensure this happens. Also, quality, systems and technologies in the power plant and the substations ensure that voltage and frequency, the two power components, constitute quality matters and quality issues in the electricity supply.
SCADA and Energy Management: The Key to Real-Time Grid Reliability
Olumuyiwa relayed that grid operations need real-time monitoring to ascertain the status of every piece of equipment in the grid. The equipment and monitoring technology is called supervisory control and data acquisition scheme technology (SCADA). SCADA helps monitor those locations and reports to a central location at the local substation. The substation must have a control room that looks at all the equipment within the substation.
SCADA also has different levels of sophistication that come with modernisation, known as energy management systems, where the SCADA can be controlled and monitored remotely. With Energy management systems, you can control a generator remotely using automatic generation control (AGC). So, these SCADA EMS systems are becoming increasingly more accurate, faster, and more reliable.
He stated, “Nigeria has a challenge: our SCADA has been completely and continuously inadequate since the beginning. There was a time when we could monitor and occasionally control equipment from the National Control Center in Osogbo. From the early 1970s to the present, SCADA has deteriorated to the point where we can monitor 40 to 50 per cent of the grid but can hardly control anything. We do not have energy management systems.”
Olumuyiwa revealed that the country’s transmission lines are not working properly because they are old. Wires carrying electricity have a lifetime, after which they begin to age. Metals, such as aluminium and alloy, could become hardened over the years, so they may need to be upgraded or replaced. Also, insulation, spacers, conductors, and all those that constitute the transmission line may need to be replaced occasionally and at the substation level.
This equipment is expected to operate over several years, but the country’s transmission line has many faults and poor maintenance, especially at the distribution level. There are scenarios where faults that should have been cleared at the distribution level are passed on to the grid’s transmission level.
The implication is that equipment that should only operate once or twice a year has to operate maybe several times a day, which increases the maintenance duty and the cost. After a few years, equipment that is used for maybe 20-30 years before replacement, maybe after about 10-15 years, is almost ready for replacement, so all those things constitute the need for constant maintenance and increased costs.
As Nigeria modernises its power transmission network, the investments and improvements made today can transform the energy landscape, driving economic growth and enhancing the quality of life for millions of Nigerians. The journey towards a modern, efficient, and reliable power transmission system needs steps to offer a glimpse of a brighter and more sustainable future for Nigeria.