ON HALF EXPONENTIAL POWER MODEL FOR THE FIRST TIME FAILURE OF POWER DISTRIBUTION TRANSFORMERS IN NIGERIA ∗ A. A. Olosunde 1‡ and R. B. Ekpo 2 1 Department of Mathematics, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, akinolosunde@gmail.com 2 Department of Mathematics, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, ekporowland@gmail.com ‡ corresponding author Indonesian Journal of Statistics and Applications Vol 4 No 2 (2020), 321 - 326 Copyright c  2020 A. A. Olosunde and R. B. Ekpo. This is an open-access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Transformer failure is a major problem confronting the Nigerian power sector, hindering the transmission and distribution of electric power to various households, institutions, and industries. Many of these transformer developed problem due to the old age of the transformers, overloading, in-availability of technical expertise, poor maintenance culture, manufacturer’s faults, just to mention few. The present research focuses on providing half exponential power model for the failure of already installed transformers, with respect to years of installation up to the time of the first failure, using secondary data from the south western part of Nigeria as a case study. The results obtained showed that half exponential power performed better in modeling the first time failure of power transformers. This was possible because of the present of shape parameter which gives flexibility to half exponential power when compared with a half normal distribution. Keywords: electric power, exponential power distribution, shape parameter, short tails. * Received Mar 2020; Accepted Jul 2020; Published online on Jul 2020 321