Power Flow Analysis of the Enhanced Proposed 330kV Transmission Network of the Nigeria Grid

The Nigeria's power sector transmission infrastructure continues to be challenged as it still remains the weak link in the electricity supply chain. The Nigerian Federal Government on its Roadmap for power sector reform highlighted that to accommodate the planned increase in generation capacity, there was need for a 30% increase in the “true deliverable” transmission capacity of the country's 330kV network. But the technical feasibility of this plan is an issue to be considered. In this work, the existing 330kV Nigeria transmission network was expanded by the introduction of new lines and power stations, simulation was carried out and the effect was analyzed using Newton-Raphson algorithm in ETAP 12.6. The base case operating condition as obtained from the power flow on which the various transfer cases were implemented, gives a fair generation and loading pattern of the Nigerian grid. The total installed generating capacity of the base case considered was 11,948MW out of which 4,347.21MW was available for load level of 3,633.6MW. Result shows that the maximum load ability of the enhanced network was increased to 238.4% compared with the existing network when the Newton – Raphson iteration method was applied.