The Federal Government has approved plans to build a new Eastern-Western electricity grid as part of efforts to address Nigeria’s recurring power grid collapses and strengthen the country’s transmission infrastructure.
The Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, disclosed this at a recent HBSAN energy conference in Lagos, where he outlined the government’s plans to tackle longstanding weaknesses in the electricity sector. He said preparations were underway to begin procurement for the projects, with Nigerians expected to start seeing their benefits within two to three years.
Tegbe also revealed that a nationwide technical audit of electricity infrastructure had commenced to identify critical faults, establish priorities and ensure that government interventions address the actual causes of transmission failures.
The minister said the government had divided the country into three energy zones to guide its intervention strategy, with particular attention to areas that account for a significant share of electricity demand.
According to him, addressing transmission challenges along the Lagos and Abuja corridors would resolve a substantial part of the country’s power sector problems. However, he stressed that improving operational efficiency alone would not be enough without expanding and strengthening the national grid.
“We have clustered Nigeria into three energy zones. The first one is the one that demands 50 per cent. If you fix Lagos and you fix the Abuja corridors, you’ve solved more than half of the problem of Nigeria,” Tegbe said.
He added that President Bola Tinubu had approved the process of developing the Eastern and Western grids, although the projects were still at the procurement stage.
“The President has approved that we commence the process of building out the grid: East and Western grid. We’re going through the procurement process, but it’s something you’ll see the benefits in two to three years,” the minister stated.
The proposed projects are expected to strengthen electricity transmission and form part of broader efforts to reduce the impact of recurring grid failures on households and businesses.
Tegbe said the government had launched a technical audit across the country to determine the specific problems affecting electricity infrastructure and identify the facilities requiring urgent repairs or replacement.
He explained that the exercise was designed to prevent resources from being spent on equipment that was not responsible for a particular failure. The audit would help officials distinguish between problems involving transformers, conductors, relays, insulators and transmission towers.
“We have started a technical audit across the entire country to say where do we have issues, and what issues specifically do we have. I don’t want to fix transformer issues where I have conductor and relay problems. I don’t want to fix insulators where the challenges I actually have are towers,” he said.
The minister said the audit was expected to be completed within a few weeks, after which the government would identify priority areas and direct interventions towards the most critical infrastructure problems.
The approach, he added, would help ensure that repair work and investment decisions were based on the actual condition of the transmission network.
The power minister also attributed some of the challenges facing Nigeria’s electricity transmission system to the age of its infrastructure, noting that parts of the network had been in service for several decades.
He said some transmission towers and lines dated back to the era of the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN), which existed before the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA).
“This government has inherited a problem of 50 years. Before I became the Minister of Power, honestly, I used to think that everybody in the power sector just didn’t know their left from right. But the reality is, some of the towers have gone down with some of the transmission lines there,” Tegbe said.
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He recalled seeing old transmission facilities bearing the ECN logo during a site visit, using the experience to illustrate the scale of the infrastructure challenges confronting the sector.
“Some of these things were built 50 years ago. That is the reality,” he added.
The government’s proposed grid expansion, combined with the nationwide technical audit, is expected to guide efforts to rehabilitate ageing infrastructure and improve the reliability of electricity transmission.
However, the minister indicated that the benefits of the new grid would take time to materialise, with the government targeting a two-to-three-year period for Nigerians to begin seeing results.
