The Transmission Company of Nigeria has signed an agreement with a group of Chinese companies to secure funding for the improvement of the strained National grid.
BusinessDay reported that the statement was according to the head of TCN, Sule Abdulaziz at the Middle East Energy Conference, on Tuesday, in Dubai.
During a panel session at the the energy conference, the TCN’s head disclosed that the funds are needed to complete the over 100 ongoing projects such as transmission line and substations building.
He mentioned that TCN has begun signing Memorandum of Understanding with some companies who showed interest.
In his words, “But now there are companies coming to us with PPA, we signed MOUs and agreements with some of them so that they can do some of these projects.”
However, they will be earning from the outcome of the project pending the time their money would be fully recovered.
“They will be earning from it until they have recovered all their money, then the assets belong to the TCN,” he said.
Meanwhile, the TCN head said that combining the current funding sources like the budgetary expenditure, donor funding from multilateral organisations including the World Bank and the African Development Bank and through the TCN’s own internally, the generated revenue were still insufficient to meet the financing required to fund on-going transmission projects.
“We have met 16 companies mostly from China and there is another one, an Indian company called Paras. We have already gone into such agreements with them,” he said.
After his presentation, the TCN CEO told BusinessDay that he was unable to reveal the specifics of the deals, but a search of international business publications revealed that TCN had chosen a small number of Chinese companies, with the most recent being bids for a $155 million network extension in April.
The goal of this energy conference according to the organisers is to guide the Middle East and African region to build resilient energy systems and infrastructures for energy transition.
