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‘BEDC not responsible for four-week outage in Benin City’

By Michael Egbejule, Benin City
22 October 2018   |   3:18 am
Benin Electricity Distribution Company (BEDC) has urged residents in Benin City, Edo State, not to blame the company for the recent power outage witnessed in some parts of the state capital. The appeal came on the heels of recent power outage in several parts of the state capital for over three weeks. Head of the…

[FILE] Benin City, Edo State. PHOTO: getgripng.com

Benin Electricity Distribution Company (BEDC) has urged residents in Benin City, Edo State, not to blame the company for the recent power outage witnessed in some parts of the state capital.

The appeal came on the heels of recent power outage in several parts of the state capital for over three weeks.

Head of the company in the state, Fidelis Obishai, said at the weekend that the blackout was occasioned by faulty transformers belonging to the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN).

Obishai explained that the TCN lost its 60MVA transformer on September 24, which affected three major 33KV feeders belonging to BEDC and connected to Ikpoba dam injection substation, Evbuotubu/Egor and Sapele road/Koko feeders.

He noted that the distribution company had to introduce a load-shedding plan, with a six-hour rotation, and moved the affected customers to other feeders.

This, he said, distorted the already established “predictable” power flow arrangement in some parts of the city.

When contacted, spokesman of Benin TCN told our correspondent that he was not authorised to speak on the matter.

However, Obishai said: “When it happened, we were thinking that it was a one day or two affair. As I speak to you, the transformer is still out of circuit. I cannot even tell when that transformer will be coming back to service.

“The best option we needed immediately was to rearrange our light distribution. So, we had to come up with a load-shedding plan because if I do not rotate the loading, I would overload the transformers.”

He lamented that only 360 megawatts (mw) of power accrued to the Disco, as against the 800mw desired to cater for its over 800,000 customers in Edo, Delta, Ondo and Ekiti states.

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