The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) has introduced a new Load & Outage Analytics platform aimed at giving the utility clearer, faster insight into outages, load performance, and losses across the national grid.
The system was unveiled during a technical presentation and live demonstration held on Wednesday, August 26, 2026, at TCN’s Corporate Headquarters in Abuja, with staff and management in attendance.
Speaking through General Manager, Project Coordination, Engr. Aminu Tahir, TCN’s Managing Director/CEO, Engr. Sule Ahmed Abdulaziz, praised the team behind the platform’s development.
While acknowledging that the full system has not yet been rolled out, he said the technology has already improved visibility into the transmission network.
He pointed to technical and commercial losses as a persistent drag on TCN’s performance and called for sharper analysis of load management and supply-demand matching, arguing that better grid stability would cut outages, boost efficiency, and reduce the costs tied to prolonged interruptions.
General Manager, Operations, Engr. Godwin Afamefuna Aguiyi, then walked attendees through the platform in detail.
He described the problems it is meant to solve: reliability data currently scattered across regional spreadsheets, reporting processes that take days to complete manually, inconsistent methods for calculating key performance indicators, and no reliable audit trail.
Together, he said, these gaps slow down management decisions and undercut national reliability assessments.
Built entirely in-house by the Operations Department, just under a year after TCN’s Transmission Service Operator (TSO) unit was established, the Streamlit-based platform comprises thirteen modules.
It offers load analysis by region, station, transformer, and feeder, automatically classifies outages, and generates reliability KPI reports, cutting what once took days down to minutes. Governance safeguards are built in as well, including role-based access, structured data uploads, individual staff logins in place of shared credentials, and full audit trails.
To illustrate the platform’s capabilities, Engr. Aguiyi presented July 2026 outage figures, describing them as raw, field-submitted data meant to be cross-checked against the official release from the Nigerian Independent System Operator (NISO) for the same period.
Nationwide, 3,714 outages were recorded, with 48,603 MWh of load lost. Lagos region alone accounted for 20,693 MWh of that loss, along with 572 emergency outages, 306 forced outages, and 129 planned outages.
Twenty-two feeders exceeded allowable outage hours, translating to losses worth ₦720.33 million; the OBOSI feeder in Onitsha, for instance, lost 1,063.74 MWh at Band A rates.
He noted that this feeder-level data covers only the portion of load and outages for which TCN itself is accountable, separate from losses attributable to the Distribution Companies.
The platform also incorporates the Fault Attribution Ratio (FAR), the regulatory mechanism used to assign responsibility for service interruptions between TCN and the DisCos.
Under the existing Service Level Agreement, TCN is allowed 30 percent of downtime responsibility and DisCos 70 percent, though Engr. Aguiyi clarified this figure sets an overall allowable basis rather than applying uniformly to every outage, since each incident is attributed individually by fault type and responsible segment.
He added that, with the right interface energy measurement devices in place, full deployment of the system could also enable monitoring of Transmission Losses Factor (TLF) network-wide.
He closed by recommending the platform be rolled out nationally, paired with IoT integration for real-time data capture and infrastructure upgrades such as display systems and improved internet connectivity at stations.
Executive Director, Human Resources & Corporate Services, Mrs. Abiodun Afolabi-Fadahunsi, said management remains committed to equipping technical teams with the tools needed to maintain grid stability, commending engineers and system operators for their daily professionalism.
She said management continues to review daily grid reports to address operational needs in real time and will keep backing technical teams with the resources they require.
If fully implemented, the platform could bring an end to decades of manual, fragmented outage reporting, help recover revenue by exposing feeder-level inefficiencies, reinforce DisCo accountability under existing regulatory frameworks, and position TCN as a more data-driven transmission operator in Africa’s power sector.
Infrastructure gaps and stakeholder buy-in remain the biggest hurdles, but the platform offers an early look at what a more accountable, modern power grid in Nigeria could look like.
