According to electricity experts, unless the federal government addresses imperfections in its rotating reserve, variable loads and bad investments by distribution companies or DISCOs, the electricity sector may never be free from outages and continuous outages.
This comes after five system failures occurred in the four months between February and April 2022. This was discussed in the paper To Spinning Reserve or Not to Spinning Reserve?
Network outages and crashes occur when there are system glitches along the transmission line and the ready solution, which it calls spinning reserve, isn't immediately available because there are few or no motivated vendors to do it Service.
According to international best practice, a rotating reserve should be allowed to represent 10% of total production capacity.As a result, the Nigerian grid could consume up to 600 MW.
Grid instability has led to repeated forced outages of the power system over the years, affecting the country's economic growth due to an unstable power grid.
Grid disruptions are generally caused by fluctuations in generation and demand, resulting in as has shown In the snapshot of Nigeria's grid frequency deviations, these frequency deviations are well outside the operating limits of the 50 Hz and 0.25 Hz grid code and often exceed the "system voltage" limits of 1.25 Hz.
Use Reserves are mandatory according to Section 15.8.1 and must be contractually formalized. A rotating minimum reserve sufficient to cover the largest credible trip is required to protect Nigeria's power grid.
This is due to the network operators' inability to keep the frequency within the narrow band required by the network regulations. Contrary to § 15.3.1 of the Netzordnung, which states that the frequency must be kept at 50 Hz, the frequency varies from 51.5 Hz to 48.5Hz daily.
Under normal conditions, the National Control Center strives to maintain the system frequency within a restricted operating band of +/- 0.5 percent (49.75 - 50.25 Hz) of 50 Hz for at least 97 percent of the time .
The frequency control of the electrical system must be within the limits of 50 Hz +/- 2.5 percent (48.75 – 51.25 Hz) during system loading.
The audit also mentioned the system operator's inability to maintain network stability within acceptable technical limits to keep boundaries.