The management of Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company (IBEDC) has apologised to its customers at Mowe, Ibafo and Magboro, all in Ogun, over poor electricity supply in the areas.
The company, in a statement made available to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Ibadan on Tuesday, said that work was already in progress to address the challenges.
The Chief Operating Officer (COO) of IBEDC, Mr John Ayodele, attributed the poor power supply being experienced in those communities to some challenges between the company and Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN).
According to him, the three communities get their supply from the 132KV/33KV transmission station at Oke-Aro, with only 13MV allocation by TCN, as against about 40MW required by them.
Ayodele said since TCN could not allocate the required energy to serve those communities, the only option remaining was to deploy intensive load management to ensure that customers had equal hours of daily supply.
“Another major challenge is that the 33KV, which is a straight network, is solely under the control of TCN.
“Whenever there is a fault, the normal routine is that our engineers must get an approval from TCN before repairs can commence, and this process is a bit challenging,” Ayodele said. He added that the nature of the fault and the terrain of the network affected could also make the process more cumbersome.
The COO further explained that IBEDC was working on the reconstruction of the old Owode-Egba network to enable some of the communities benefit from the newly-inaugurated Abeokuta Transmission Station at Kobape.
“We are also appealing to our unmetered customers in this locality to take advantage of the Meter Asset Provider Scheme (MAP) to get metered.
“Our staffers are on strict schedules to ensure that customers’ issues are promptly addressed,” Ayodele said.