.
By Nasir Kura
The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) has set a target of 20,000 megawatts of electricity transmission capacity by 2021, Managing Director of TCN, Mr. Usman Mohammed, said on Monday.
Addressing State House correspondents in Abuja, Mohammed said the company has established robust transmission, rehabilitation and expansion programmes for the country’s power sector.
“We have established transmission, rehabilitation and expansion programme. The main objective of this is to rehabilitate, stabilize and expand the delivery capacity of TCN to at least 20,000 megawatts by 2021 and we are on track,” he said.
According to him, transmission capacity has improved by over 3,000 megawatts between February and December, an indication that the rehabilitation and expansion programme embarked upon is on track.
He said the increase in transmission capacity has not translated in distribution because of ratio of demand to supply, and expressed confidence that it would soon change with more industrial customers demanding to be put on the national grid.
The TCN boss also told journalists that international donors have injected $1.6 billion to finance critical electricity transmission and distribution projects that would lead to substantial improvement in electricity supplies to end-users with a short period.
He said the projects are Abuja transmission ring scheme which is financed by the French Development Agency which attracted $170 million; the Nigeria Electricity Transmission Access Project (NETAP), a $486 million project financed by the World Bank; Lagos- Ogun Transmission Project, costing $200 million financed by Japanese International Agency (JICA); Northern Corridor Transmission Project to be financed by French Development Agency and European Union at $245 and €25 million respectively and Nigeria Transmission Expansion project to be financed by the African Development Bank at the cost of $410 million.
