The Market Operator (MO), an arm of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), will henceforth penalise operators, who fail to comply with the market rules in the Nigerian Electricity Market (NEM).
Mr Moshood Saleema, the Market Operator, announced this at a stakeholders’ workshop in Abuja on Thursday.
The Market Operator is the commercial administrator of the NEM.
It has the mandate of ensuring fair-play and non-discriminatory market administration to all electricity market participants.
Its major mandate is the administration on wholesale electricity market, including the activity of administration of settlement, in accordance with market rules.
Stakeholders operating in the market included Electricity Generating Companies (GENCOS,) Transmission Service Provider (TSP) Electricity Distribution Companies (DISCOS) and Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Company (NBET).
The workshop, with the theme “Eliminating Blame Games in Nigerian Electricity Market“, is designed to evolve measures of recovering revenue for the electricity value-chain in the country.
Saleeman said that the meeting became necessary due to the infrastructure and liquidity challenges preventing the market from developing its potential.
He said lots of blame games were being traded in the market by the operators, adding that games had not solved the challenges in the power sector.
According to him, what will solve the problem is the collective ability to take appropriate actions within the various areas of the operators’ responsibilities.
He said that the operators had the responsibility of building an efficient and sustainable electricity market.
The MO also said that critical to the success of the market and the entire industry were issues of transparency and compliance with relevant rules and codes in the market.
He said that it was important that stakeholders played to the rules governing the market.
This, Saleeman said, would result in the ability of the sector to harness the huge non utilised generation capacity.
He said abiding by the laws would help accelerate completion of critical transmission infrastructure projects, reinforcement and expansion of distribution networks.
On remittance by DISCOs, Saleeman said there was now a significant improvement on the transfer of revenue collected by the DISCOs on behalf of the chain.
“We now experience marginal increase in payment by about 35 per cent but we are not yet there; it is actually increasing gradually.“
Mr Musa Gummel, Head of the System Operator (SO), also an arm of TCN that controls the grid, said that the market had not been able to recover 100 per cent of its invoices.
This, he said, was a major challenge, adding that the regular interactions and innovations with stakeholders would evolve solutions to the challenges in the market.
Gummel said that the SO was trying to upgrade the manpower of its system to effectively manage the system, minimise collapses and ensure stable flow of electricity.
The Interim Managing Director of TCN, Mr Usman Mohammed, said that TCN had a current installed capacity of 6,500, adding that TCN could currently wheel 5,500 Megawatts of electricity.
Mohammed, represented by the Executive Director, Finance and Accounts, Mr Sunny Ilochie, said that the current management of TCN had successfully reduced the transmission loss to 8 per cent.
He said that efforts were on to sustain its further reduction against the initial double digit that it had oscillated on over the years.
(NAN)