TCN Schedules Six-Hour Abuja Maintenance After Days of Power Outages

The Transmission Company of Nigeria has announced a six-hour power disruption in parts of Abuja on Saturday, saying scheduled maintenance at its Katampe 132/33kV transmission substation will prevent the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company from taking supply for onward delivery to customers.

The exercise, running from 10:00am to 4:00pm, covers one of the substation's 60MVA power transformers and its associated switchgear. Affected areas include Katampe Main, Katampe Extension, Jahi and their environs. Residents were advised to plan for the outage window. Katampe is one of the main injection points feeding the northern FCT distribution corridor.

TCN apologised for the inconvenience in a notice issued on Saturday, framing the shutdown as part of routine maintenance rather than a response to a fault. AEDC confirmed it would not be able to take bulk supply during the window and asked customers to make alternative arrangements. Katampe serves as a critical injection point for the northern FCT feeders.

A capital city already short of power

The planned interruption comes after a difficult stretch for Federal Capital Territory consumers. TCN restored bulk supply on Thursday to communities including Daba Estate, Police Barracks, Idu, Paipe and parts of the Saburi corridor, following an outage that began early on October 14 and lasted more than 40 hours after a feeder tripped and a circuit breaker fault delayed repairs.

Earlier in the month, a technical fault on the 330kV Shiroro-Katampe line disrupted supply across Garki, parts of Apo and Asokoro, Wuse zones, Jabi, Utako, Life Camp, Gwarinpa, Kubwa, Dutse, Suleja and adjoining areas. A separate storm on October 7 collapsed three transmission towers along the Apo-Karu-Keffi-Akwanga line.

Landlords' associations in Ushafa, Dutse and Kubwa had weighed protests if the situation did not improve, according to local reports, as households and businesses counted losses from damaged goods and generator costs.

Why maintenance still matters

Transformer outages are routine in any grid, but in the FCT the cumulative effect of faults, storm damage and constrained off-take capacity means each planned or unplanned interruption lands on businesses and households already running generators at high cost.

For AEDC, the constraint is upstream: without bulk supply from TCN substations, distribution performance is capped regardless of last-mile investment. For TCN, keeping 60MVA assets in service is the cheapest way to protect capacity, even when the timing is unhelpful for consumers. Both utilities have pointed to equipment age and storm exposure as recurring causes of unplanned outages across the FCT network.

Saturday's window is short relative to the multi-day disruptions of the past week. Whether it holds to schedule, and whether supply is restored to Katampe and Jahi by 4:00pm without a follow-on fault, will be the immediate test of a grid under strain.