Ikeja Electric Plc has said some communities under its franchise network in Lagos State will experience an eight-week power outage.
In a Monday briefing, Chief Technical Officer of the company, Jide Kumapayi, expressed that the development was to enable Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) to re-conduct its 132KV lines and that the project will begin on October 11.
The re-conducting is aimed at expanding the wheeling capacity across Ikeja Electric Plc network.
According to Kumapayi, the upgrade is coming at a time when the capacity of most of the 132KV lines has become limited largely due to time and usage, leading to under-utilization.
He was quoted as saying in a post on Ikeja Electric’s website;
The TCN is currently embarking on the upgrade of 132 KV lines from Ikeja West to Ota and this activity is phased into four stages. This is the second stage and TCN is upgrading the 132kv lines with more robust and sophisticated replacements which provide an opportunity to increase power evacuation for improved supply to customers as well as offering excellent conductor capacity which can withstand very high voltage.
The upgrade which is set to commence on Monday, October 11, 2021, will affect customers within Oregun, Anifowoshe, Ojodu, Magodo, Omole, Oba-Akran, Oke-Ira, Ogba, Omole Phase 1 and parts of Ikeja, between the hours of 8:00am and 6:00pm daily, for eight weeks.
Kumapayi, however, assured that the company’s technicians will be on standby to give support when needed during the upgrade.
The Technical Director noted that the outage became necessary because some of the 132Kv lines installed over 50 years ago had become obsolete and degraded due to time and usage.
He added;
Even though this is a TCN project, we owe our customers the duty to inform them of the situation because we interface with them on a daily basis. We believe it will be for the benefit of our customers at the end of the day and will also allow Ikeja Electric to invest more in our Network to improve power supply to customers under our network. So we want to appeal to our customers to bear with us as this exercise will be beneficial toward the improvement of power supply in our network.
Also, Maximum Demand (MD) customers such as Ikeja City Mall, Police College, Lagos State University Teaching Hospital and the Ikeja High Court will be affected by the project.
