ENEO invests 20 billion FCFA per year in distribution network, upgrade strategy - Experts.

Engineer Lonchere Elvis made the revelation during a tour of the technical team of ENEO with the press in Douala, of some major places where the distribution networks upgrade system is being implemented.  
The aim of the tour, which began at the network distribution centre in Bonasama, Douala IV, was for ENEO to give the press a concrete presentation of the measures it has taken to improve the quality of services on the distribution networks in the electricity supply chain.
From the SONATREL power station in Bonasama, the ENEO technical team led by Lonchere and his colleagues, made the press to discover what is being done to secure service continuity shortly after the fire incident that brought severe outage in Douala last year. 
The actions taken by ENEO in investing hundreds of millions, has been in order to make sure that the country has better energy quality for the population, despite financial challenges.
The experts said ENEO, being a player at the last link in the electricity supply chain which has much to with the distribution network, has installations that guarantee its connection to households and industries. 
The transformation and or installation of wooden poles and outdoor transformers could be seen along the roads leading from Bonaberi, to Bomono, Dibombari Kake miang, Souza in the Moungo Division.
It consists of 18,500 km of medium-voltage lines and 18,000 km of low-voltage lines, with wood, metal or concrete poles, cabin or pole-mounted transformers in neighbourhoods, medium voltage and low voltage cables in remote facilities. 
Eneo's challenge, it was revealed, is to maintain and extend this network in order to guarantee service continuity and quality as much as possible, as well as to increase access to electricity for households and businesses.
The strategy for maintaining and extending distribution networks in recent years has been based on switching from wooden poles, which initially accounted for more than 90%, to a wood-metal-concrete mix. This, Lonchere said, was due to the fact that, the wooden poles had outdated, as such, had become a major concern in distribution disruptions.
"We noticed that there were a lot of rotten poles on the distribution networks and that has created outage during that time. We then undertook a vast campaign of replacing them. Wooden poles have a lifetime of 20 years. Most of them had already reached that age, so we decided that on the medium voltage lines, they will be replaced with concrete poles to help make the distribution networks more stable," he said.
After systemic replacements of wooden poles, the ENEO team decided to be protecting all public transformers on the system. 
Growth in population and customer base in urban, peri -ocal area and local areas, it was said, imposed on management to increase power capacity. 
Worthy of note is the fact that, the pole replacement policy is taking place across the national triangle. Comparatively, the concrete poles cost more than the wooden poles. 
The price for a concrete pole is estimated at 400,000 FCFA to 800,000 FCFA, as compared to the wooden poles which could be purchased at just 80,000 FCFA.

To maintain power capacity, ENEO has increased the number transformers from 11,000 to 18,000 to be able to absorb new consumers. Nine years ago, they had about a million customers, but recently they recorded two million in the customer base.

Local production of concrete poles
As a result, Eneo has facilitated the setting up of a local production line for concrete poles, so that it can easily supply pole replacement sites and the construction of new lines. 
The most intensive phase of implementation was between 2020 and 2022, with more than 120,000 poles replaced, of which more than 30% were metal and concrete poles. 
This approach has helped to reduce the number of incidents caused by poles by more than 60%. Similarly, the reliability rate of major distribution lines stood at 89% in 2022, five points higher than the target set for Eneo by the government. 
A line is considered reliable when, at the end of the year, it is responsible for less than 80 hours of outages per customer, due to incidents. 
Eneo now has a total of 265 medium-voltage distribution lines, also known as feeders. Some 235 of these feeders proved reliable in 2022. At the same time, most of the extensions to the distribution network by Eneo, i.e. around 1,000 km of new lines since 2019, have been installed on concrete poles. 
Investment in the distribution network over the last ten years has also resulted in a sharp increase in the number of customers connected. Eneo has connected an average of 100,000 households each year, compared to 50,000 under AES-SONEL in previous years, and 15,000 under SONEL before 2001. 
According to the World Bank, this increase in the number of connections to the network has helped increase the country's electricity access rate to 65%. 
Of the 320 billion FCFA invested by Eneo Cameroon since 2014, 40% has been devoted to the distribution network. 
Nevertheless, the growing needs to be met call for an increase in financial resources. Depending on the source, the needs are estimated at between 600 billion FCFA and 1,000 billion FCFA to consistently improve the distribution network.