Nigerians have been thrown into yet another total blackout again this year as the National grid collapsed for the tenth time in 2024.
According to the official X handle of the Nigeria National Grid, the development comes after the grid collapsed three times in one week towards the end of last month.
The latest development brings grid disturbance incidences to nine in 2024 alone.
“National Grid suffers another setback. Restoration soon,” the NationalGridNg tweeted around 3 PM on Tuesday.
The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) has yet to confirm the incident at the time of this report, leaving Nigerians in the dark as to the reason behind the series of blackouts.
On February 4, Nigeria experienced its first blackout of 2024 when the national grid collapsed at approximately 11:51am. The TCN-managed grid saw its capacity plummet from 2,407 megawatts to just 31MW by noon, and it completely shut down by 1 PM.
The minister of power, Adebayo Adelabu last month said the grid collapses are almost inevitable in Nigeria given the deplorable state of the country’s power infrastructure.
The minister also said there is a need to have power grids in different regions or states to put an end to incessant grid collapses.
According to him, having multiple power grids in each region and state would ensure stability. He also noted that the decentralization of the power sector would help the plan of building grids in each region, saying this is made possible by the Electricity Act signed by President Bola Tinubu in 2023.
“This Electricity Act has decentralized power. It has enabled all the subnational governments, the state government and the local government, to be able to participate in the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity,” Adelabu said.
“We all rely on a single national grid today, if there is a disturbance of the national grid, it affects all 36 states. It shouldn’t be like that. This will enable us to start moving gradually towards having regional groups and possibly having state grids.”
“And each of these grids will be removed and shielded from each other. So, if there’s a problem with a particular grid, only the state where it belongs will be affected, not the entire nation. So, this is one of the impacts this Electricity Act will have.”
More on the grid collapse, he more so, emphasized that the situation are inevitable without sufficient investment in the sector.
