Oscarline Onwuemenyi
02 February 2018, Sweetcrude, Abuja – Nigeria experienced another power grid collapse, which has reportedly thrown most parts of the nation into darkness.
This system collapse occurred at about 12:11 pm on the first day of February and all the electricity distribution companies (Discos) have confirmed to have lost power supply from the grid.
Sweetcrude Reports has sought confirmation and clarifications about the cause of this collapse from the Ministry of Power, Works and Housing as well as the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), and is yet to get any responses.
Most of Nigeria’s power generation is from thermal power stations that require gas for fuel. The gas is produced by oil and gas companies overseen by the Ministry of Petroleum Resources and is delivered to the power stations through pipelines owned and operated by Nigerian Gas Processing and Transmission Company (NGPTC), a subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).
This latest incident follows numerous similar system collapse that occurred last month.
The TCN reported that the national electricity grid shut down six times in less than 2 weeks in early January 2018, from the statistics that was revealed.
According to the generation statistics of the Nigeria Electricity System Operator (NESO), an arm of the TCN, the national grid collapsed six times between January 1 and January 8.
An analysis of the statistics showed that the country’s power generation crashed from 3,667.5 megawatts on January 1, 2018, to 5.0MW on January 2, which was the first system collapse in the year.
The second grid collapse occurred on January 3, as power generation on that day was 51MW. This moved up to 2,660.1MW the following day.
But on January 5, the grid collapsed for the third time to 107MW.
Three other grid collapses were recorded on January 6, 7 and 8, as the country’s power generation dropped to 173MW, 164.2MW and 72MW, respectively.
Findings showed that peak power generation during the eight-day period hovered between 3,707.2MW and 4,982.7MW, but these figures were not sustained as the grid kept collapsing.
It was observed that 2,596.2MW of electricity was generated on January 27, which was the most recent power generation figure released by the NESO on Monday afternoon.
The poor power generation on January 27 was due to gas constraint, which prevented the production of over 2,321.8MW of electricity.
Explaining the reasons for the grid collapses, the interim Chief Executive Officer, TCN, Alhaji Usman Gur Mohammed, at a recent event in Abuja, stated that there was a need for adequate investment in order to stabilise the grid.
He said, “There are certain things that need to be put in place for us to have grid stability and one of them is that we need to put in adequate investment. One of the key investments that we need to do quickly is that we need to build another line between Benin and Omotosho.
“When we do that, we think that we will be able to stabilise the grid, because 70 per cent of the instability we have is between Lagos and Benin. This, of course, is because we have so many generation stations located on that axis.”