The presidents promise

The president's promise

PEOPLE have used the words regular, continuous and reliable when they talk of the power supply that the people desire. Each word is perhaps a mental choice, but what speakers might have had in mind is power at the flip of a switch. And that was what the president said he would give to the people in December 2001. Can he do it?

For an answer one should take a look at what he has to do. This piece would do that under titles with which the people are now familiar. But first, let's look at some terms. Generation as used in the industry means to produce power. Many would now be familiar with that after all, they have had to do their own since NEPA's great decline. Not so transmission, for what they produced at home they have consumed there. Yet, they have used cables to transmit or to pass it across to control switches in those homes so that they could turn them off the plant if they had to. From the control switch, wires linked other units including distribution boards. And those boards formed the safe link with the nooks and the corners of their houses.

From what one has read, he had allotted huge sums of money for work on plants in many grid power stations. NEPA's Weekly Situation Report debuted on April 9, and has confirmed that works are on hand to repair faulty plants. This is good news for generation. One hopes that the contractors would make it better news if they would keep to time frames.

Not much is in the news on power transmission. Hoodlums had done damage to towers in many parts of the country again and again. But NEPA had restored them. Transmission lines from Alaoji to Akwa Ibom and Cross River states had been a weak link in grid supply to that part. Even if NEPA had not changed that, plan for a gas-fired plant by Akwa Ibom should add to the power available to both states. Yet, it is true to say that transmission had not been NEPA's focus in the last half a decade or so. Plants in power stations broke down one after another and they ran around for the resource to bring them back to life.

For example three transmission lines serve Lagos from the grid. NEPA built the third more than one and a half decades ago. They should have had more lines to bring power to a city that gives them 45 per cent of their revenue, many would say. And that would be right. One ought to expect more lines if more would make it easier to give reliable service. After all, it would help the length of service time to the consumer and increase the total time-use of the product. The industry measures what it sells in the unit that it calls kilowatt-hours. It is a time-based product. And so too, would be the revenue from it sales. Indeed, it says that its revenue grows with the time-use of its product.

It is a magic word, this time-use. But how does one achieve the longest time-use in such a service? It is not easy. It costs much money. The industry uses many of the same facilities at every stage and time, so that there is a replacement for the one, a choice, in the event of a breakdown. As an analogy, if one had one car and it breaks down, one would have no choice but to walk if there were no other vehicles.

Distribution and transmission lines do the same things but on scales and voltage levels that are different. Transmission is over longer distances, and distribution is local to homes, to streets, to estates, even to areas. It is more widespread. Because it is widespread, distribution goes on all the time. Each would be on a low scale. And none may attract much attention. However, news of the import of large numbers of distribution transformers shows that the Federal Government might be as busy there as it is in generation. But would that impact on distribution in the country? This is where hope must be bleak.

ECN took over PWD and Native Authority power plants in the country on April 1, 1951. Since it took over, the policy on power supply has not changed. No one wrote it down. But the way it worked was that a resource given had to serve as many people as possible. Serve cheaply and serve more. Practice in Lagos was the same as in the smallest village up the country. For a people whose knowledge of light source was of palm-oil lamps for so long, this was no tragedy. But industries bore the brunt of the failure. The nature of distribution had made it look like NEPA had upheld the ethos more in that sector in transmission. But the effect had ruined power supply.

The earliest years of the ECN knew the need for at least the barest of stand-by in supply facilities. And they built lines and installed cables such that they shut down service to the fewest number when there was a breakdown. But no one saw power supply as a business. It was a service. A few years into independence, and the politics of service grew wings and bile. Politicians had fought and won their battle for control. Having done so, they had to put the policy of service in harness. And decline was just orders away.

Then you could strip a whole Transmission Substation, as was the case in Ikeja. And you could use the parts as orders asked. It did not matter that a factory waited for service that could have boosted output and increased the GDP. And you could shut down the whole of Somolu to install new equipment, as was the case a few months ago. No one in business would do that if it would lead to the depletion of earnings, one would bet. If there were alternatives, no one would have blacked out large numbers of consumers for two minutes not to talk of two weeks.

NEPA's distribution systems are just lines run on their own. Lines closed or tied to others that there might have been, are old and decrepit. They are on their own and the services they give are dead when they break down. They install single transformers with none others to support them. Lines from them are as much alone as they are. A fuse protects each line, and the fuse too, is alone. When it burns it shuts out many tens of consumers until a faults-man shows up to place a new fuse. That is if anyone reported it. It is a case of one line, one transformer, one wire, and one fuse for sub-groups and groups. This is the same for all of about 300 customers served by each distribution transformer. And there are many thousands of such transformers. Besides, lines built in the last two decades are substandard. Clearly, what distribution there is, is in a bad way. It belongs to man's earliest trials as he learnt the use of the source of power that has transformed his life. It has to change if one would ever have power at the flip of a switch.

But you cannot change a decrepit system of more than 50 years in two. The President would probably restore it to the best that the country ever had. Reliable and continuous supply belongs to a different technology and a new age. We are in the new, but we live in the old. If one has one car one must walk if it breaks down. More cars belong to the rich. Reliable power belongs to big business or to rich countries that are able to support it. Power supply at the flip of a switch here as service to the people? Not in a hundred years, one would say.