Politically speaking and despite its inadequacies, the Nigerian national grid traverses the entire country and is a humongous resource capable of acting as the catalyst necessary for the industrial growth of our nation and improving the quality of life of Nigerians.

As President Muhammadu Buhari prepares to hand over power to the President-elect, Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu on the 29th of May 2023, hawks are emerging and focusing on the transmission arm of the power sector with different shapes and sizes of knives ready to dissect this arm of the value chain in the name of transferring it from government-owned to privately-run outfit with the expected injection of efficiency into its operations.

In recent times, they have been clamoring for the privatization of transmission as the solution to the intractable power supply problem in Nigeria, making false claims that it is the weakest link in the power sector value chain. The pertinent question to ask is, is this a patriotic or selfish call? It will be recalled that similar attitude forced the Goodluck Jonathan administration to hurriedly privatize the distribution arm mostly to politicians and cronies with little knowledge of what and how to go about fixing the sector, resulting into poor performance over the years. Those that bought the distribution companies had a wrong perception of viewing the power sector like the telecommunications sector where less physical infrastructure is needed to deliver service.

On the other hand, the privatization of the generation arm was more successful as investors who bought the different power stations injected efficiency with resultant improvement in their operation and generation capacities. What is required for more improvement of this arm is for the government to review the national gas policy to make more gas available for thermal stations and these stations should revamp most of their machines that have one technical fault or another. Also, the generation mix should be expanded to embrace other renewable sources of power generation such as solar, wind, biomass et al.

With regards to transmission, the government should not be in a hurry to privatize the transmission infrastructure because of several reasons, the most important being the issue of national security. Transmission stations and lines at both 330kV and 132kV levels are available nationwide and the security implication of releasing such to private hands should be considered.

This writer prefers a combination of both grid, mini-grid and off-grid approach in order to improve transmission of electricity in Nigeria.

In sustaining the national grid, the government must introduce some basic facilities one of which is the provision of a functional Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) scheme for the effective control and monitoring of the grid system. With a functional SCADA system, the market must procure Spinning Reserve to respond to unexpected load changes and generation losses, which will eliminate frequent system collapses.

Additionally, the government should embark on a comprehensive review of the existing protection scheme at every critical nodes to achieve better relay coordination.

The quality of power at every point on the grid requires close attention in order to meet with the recommended voltage and frequency. In this regard, industries like steel plants should be compelled to install adequate harmonics filters to protect transmission equipment while transmission should install power quality equipment like Reactors, Capacitor Banks etc for reliability and stability of electrical power.

If the incoming government implement these and more measures, the national grid will be optimized for steady and stable power supply in Nigeria.