Nigeria to export unutilised power to West African countries

Nigeria is to export the excess quantum of electricity that is unutilised in the country to other West African countries.

The Transmission Company of Nigeria said the export would raise the quantum of electricity exported from Nigeria to the West African region.

Speaking at the meeting of the joint technical working group of the West African Power Pool in Abuja on Monday, the Managing Director, TCN, Usman Mohammed, who is also the chairman of the WAPP executive board, said power distribution companies in Nigeria were still not taking all the electricity from generation companies.

He said, “For Nigeria, if you look at the generation and what the distribution networks can take, we don’t have a shortage, we have a surplus.

“From the system point of view, we cannot say Nigeria has a shortage, the excess we have, we can send to other parts of West Africa but we need to have some few things put in place. One of such is the synchronisation so that we can actually export energy from Nigeria to West Africa.”

The Federal Government had repeatedly stated that about 2,000 megawatts of electricity had been stranded over time due to the inability of the Discos to distribute the additional quantum of energy to domestic power users.

Mohammed also stated that apart from selling power to other countries of West Africa and earning foreign exchange from such, the expected expansion and synchronisation of the region’s electricity lines could help expand Nigeria’s generation capacity.

The TCN boss noted that the meeting of the WAPP executives was to advance the grid synchronisation programme.

He said, “We are holding a meeting for the synchronisation of the interconnections between the various countries. The intention is to synchronise them because WAPP wants to ensure that energy flow from Nigeria to Senegal and back.

“Where energy is cheap, it can flow to where it is demanded and in that respect, we can now reduce the cost of electricity in West Africa which is the most expensive in the world.”

Mohammed added, “We want to synchronise to bring our frequency level to that of WAPP standard – 49.80 and 50.20 hertz, which is the standard all of us must look towards. When we achieve that and synchronise our networks, energy will flow across.”