THE Transmission Company of Nigeria, TCN, has made a case for functional SCADA in order to prevent a repeat of the nationwide blackout experienced last week’s Wednesday and Thursday in most parts of the country following multiple tripping of the transmission line along Onitsha substation in Anambra State.
The Managing Director of TCN, UsmanGur, Mohammed who stated this, while speaking on the collapse of national grid, argued that the catastrophe would have been prevented with functional Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) in place.
According to him, “If we have a functional SCADA, it will show clearly what happened on the grid, and that is why we in TCN, deployment of SCADA is not an option, we have to deploy it.”
Mohammed stressed further that, “Because for us to have modern grid you need to have a functional SCADA for management of the grid.” He added that “The collapse of the National Grid on May 8, at 2:32p.m. was caused by a multiple tripping on its substation in Onitsha, Anambra State.
Mohammed also said that the collapse may also have been triggered because one of the generators went off. “What happened a day before yesterday at 14;32 hours was a case of system collapse, we had tripping. “The reason for the grid collapse was that there was a multiple tripping around Onitsha substation. We are also suspecting that one of the generators went out.”
“We have sent our team of engineers to go and investigate, we normally investigate this kind of disturbances.” Mohammed also revealed that the Commission required spinning reserve in order to effectively tackle the incidents of national grid collapse.
To this ends, he said the Commission has written the Nigeria Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC, to give rapid approval to a 250 Megawatts spinning reserve procurement to tackle the grid system collapse. He said the TCN had procured 250MW spinning reserve, but was waiting for NERC to approve the implementation. He added the spinning reserve would ensure fluctuations on the national grid are managed to prevent future system collapse.
On how the company restored the power grid, the MD said, “The process of restoring the grid takes time. Now if you look at where we are now, we are still at the process of restoration. “We have reached almost the whole of the country now, but I cannot tell that we are at the stage where one can say the grid is stable.
“This is because as we restore supply to a particular place, distribution also has to pick the load and these activities are done gradually. When we are restoring supply after a system collapse, we also don’t allow them to pick the load all of the sudden because the generators are coming gradually.”
Source: Vanguard
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