On Saturday, the national electricity power grid in Nigeria collapsed to 70.60 megawatts at around 4 pm, leading to another round of blackout across various states.
This marked the seventh time in 2024 that the national grid had collapsed. President Bola Tinubu, speaking at the inauguration of the 31-member Presidential Economic Coordination Council, expressed his disappointment over the low electricity generation in the country, saying “We have the challenge of energy security in Nigeria. We need to work together to improve our oil and gas sector, and we must also increase electricity generation, as well as distribution throughout the country. We are determined to do that with your cooperation, collaboration, and recommendations. As a nation, it is so shameful that we are still generating 4.5GW of electricity.”
The Nigeria Grid: Generation Profile data from the Transmission Company of Nigeria revealed that power generation initially increased to 3,976.24MW in the morning but dropped to 1,075.08MW in the afternoon, before crashing to 70.60MW.
This significant drop in power generation affected several states, prompting electricity distribution companies (DisCos) to confirm the system collapse and apologize to their customers for the outage.
The Enugu Electricity Distribution Company reported that all its interfaces in the TCN stations were out of supply, affecting customers in several states. Similarly, the Kaduna and Kano DisCos also cited the system collapse of the national grid as the cause of the power outage in their franchise states.
In addition, the Ikeja DisCo released a statement explaining the service disruption and assured customers of efforts to restore power supply.
Adetayo Adegbemle, the convener and Executive Director of Power Up Nigeria, expressed his disappointment over the continuous grid collapses, emphasizing the need for accountability and swift action to address the situation. He called for better coordination within the electricity value chain to prevent future occurrences.
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