Minta: Towards a complete stabilisation of the electricity network

After about 4 years without electricity, the town of Minta has been reconnected to the network since March 2021 following serious maintenance work on the distribution network that powers the district. Since March, these actions have continued to reconnect all the villages in the district.

Eneo has made a number of investments in and around Minta, and continues to strive to improve the quality of service in the East operating Region of Eneo*, despite a particularly difficult economic outlook.

• Replacement of 335 critical MV wood poles, including 38 in concrete;
• Replacement of 84 critical LV wood poles;
• Replacement of 03 three-phase and 02 single-phase transformers;
• Bulldozing of 22 km on the Bouam-Andom stretch of road.

• Replacement of 224 MV wood poles, including 158 in concrete;
• Replacement of 226 critical LV wood poles;
• Replacement of 02 single-phase transformers and other network components;
• Bulldozing 32 km of the Mbeth-Nguelemendouka line. The town of Nguelemendouka is still out of service and requires a lot of resources. The need for medium-voltage concrete poles has been estimated at nearly 200, and will require further mobilisation from Eneo.

Eneo's efforts are still being undermined in Minta, and elsewhere in the East, because fraudulent connections impact the quality of supply and the people do not pay their bills.
Minta is fraught with many direct connections that undermine efforts to stabilise the quality of service. Cleaning up this network requires substantial investment and resources. For the time being, Eneo's first priority is to stabilise the electricity supply.
After a long period without power, service was restored in Minta on 13 March 2021. Since then, the whole town and its surroundings have been consuming electricity without paying, about 200 kW to date.

• Falling poles and vegetation problems in some wetlands and on some lines;
• Third parties who very often cut down trees that fall on the electrical works;
• Inexperienced individuals making phase changes and direct connections, which cause faults that have repercussions on the power station in the form of frequent tripping.

For the time being, troubleshooting on the Medium Voltage power line running from the Bertoua thermal power plant to Minta has identified four (04) rotten wood poles which were immediately replaced. On 13 October, tests to restore power to the line concerned were unsuccessful, causing a blackout at the Bertoua thermal power plant. As the test was inconclusive, the line was isolated 25km before Minta, so as to be able to re-supply the upstream localities, which is currently underway.
Work to replace another set of three (03) fallen wood poles already identified is continuing, while completing the fault detection on the remaining section, with the hope, at the end, that the entire population up to Minta will be re-powered, at the latest this weekend.
Generally, in the East region: the improvement in the quality of service is already being felt by the population and the authorities. A combination of major actions account for this improvement...
Besides the continuous maintenance of our energy generation and distribution equipment, we are carrying out a campaign to identify non-technical losses, mainly due to fraud. This operation has helped us to disconnect several fraudulent connections from our network, and has resolved a large part of the overload problem on public distribution transformers.
We are also carrying out an operation to normalise meters by first replacing obsolete equipment, an effort that we will continue with the gradual introduction of post-paid or prepaid smart meters, to improve the metering of consumption at the customer's premises and empower them more.

*Eneo's operating regions do not necessarily correspond to the country's administrative regions.

 {gallery}Minta{/gallery}