- By Halimah Olamide
For the sixth time within four months, Nigeria has yet again experienced another power grid collapse on Monday.
The electricity generation on the system collapsed from 2,583.77 megawatts at 2 am to 64.7MW around 3am before the grid was restored later in the day.
Although the Transmission Company of Nigeria attributed the cause of Monday’s grid collapse to a fire incident, it had consistently blamed gas shortage for power generation and the vandalism of power infrastructure for the recurrent cases of grid collapse in Nigeria.
Nigeria generates an average of 4,000MW of electricity for an estimated 200 million citizens across the country.
According to data from the Independent System Operator, an arm of the Transmission Company of Nigeria, showed that only one electricity generation company, Ibom Power, was active at the time of the grid collapse on Monday morning.
Recall that NPO reported that the troubled national grid has collapsed again in Nigeria for the fifth time, therefore throwing a sizeable region of the country into darkness.
Meanwhile, Power generation on the grid crashed further to 44.5MW around 4 am, before rising to 132.29MW an hour later.
The grid collapse was confirmed by Jos Electricity Distribution Company. The Head, Corporate Affairs, JEDC, Dr Friday Elijah, in a notice to customers, said,
“The current outage being experienced within our franchise states is a result of loss of power supply from the national grid.
“The loss of power supply from the national grid occurred in the early hours at about 0242 hours of today, Monday, April 15, 2024, hence the loss of power supply on all our feeders.”
Elijah, however, expressed hope that the grid would be restored for normal power supply to electricity consumers.
Also on Monday, economic activities in the South-East were grounded as the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company Plc announced a total system collapse in its network.
EEDC’s Head, Corporate Communications, Emeka Ezeh, who announced this in a statement titled: “Notice Of Total System Collapse,” said the system collapse occurred at 2:41 am on April 15, 2024.
Ezeh, however, appealed to the company’s customers in the five states of the South-East for understanding, while waiting for the Transmission Company of Nigeria to restore power supply.
“The Enugu Electricity Distribution Company Plc wishes to inform her esteemed customers of a total system collapse which occurred at 2:41 am today, April 15, 2024,” Ezeh said in the statement.
“This resulted in the loss of supply to all our interface TCN stations. Consequently, we were unable to provide service to our customers in Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu, and Imo states.”
TCN, in a statement issued in Abuja by its spokesperson, Ndidi Mbah, said the fire incident caused a partial disturbance of the nation’s grid.
“At 02:41 hours today, April 15, 2024, a fire erupted at the Afam V 330kV busbar coupler, leading to the tripping of units at Afam III and Afam VI. This resulted in a sudden generation loss of 25MW and 305MW, destabilising the grid and causing a partial collapse.”