David Ladipo, the chief executive officer of Azura Power West Africa Ltd, has said Nigeria must expand its power transmission grid and review the terms of its management before Africa’s biggest economy can effectively boost electricity supply, Bloomberg reports.
While Nigeria sold 17 state-owned power utilities three years ago, it retained control of the transmission grid and signed a short-term management contract with Manitoba Hydro Electric Board of Canada to run the entity now known as the Transmission Co. of Nigeria (TCN).
The power grid is going to be the “big bottleneck” as it can only carry about 5,000 megawatts, less than a third of what the country needs to end blackouts, said Ladipo, whose company is investing about $900 million to build a 450-megawatt natural gas-fueled plant in the southern state of Edo. “A proper concession is doable or the alternative is just to have a bigger management contract” that enables Manitoba to do more, he said. “At the moment, the transmission constraints are masked by the gas supply shortages,” Ladipo added.