Oscarline Onwuemenyi
01 April 2016, Sweetcrude, Abuja – After more than three hours of zero power generation from all the power plants in the country, power generation was restored later on Thursday.
Announcing the return to normalcy, the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr. Babatunde Fashola said Nigeria’s power generation which collapsed completely on Thursday at exactly 12.58pm to zero megawatts (MW) and lasted for up to about three hours has been restored back to normalcy.
Speaking in Abuja, Fashola explained that the collapse was induced by a sudden downing of the three turbines t the Jebba Hydro Power Station. He noted that the turbines were quickly restarted and power generation then began to grow back.
Th Minister, however, did not disclose the current generation level of the system.
Dramatic collapses are not altogether strange in the Nigerian power sector, but nothing matches the number of system failures that have occurred in the sector over the past few months, throwing large swathes of the country into darkness every now and then.
Data from the Nigerian System Operations, a department of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), had shown that around 12.58pm on Thursday, there was no power available for distribution across the country.
The System Operation’s hourly record indicated that Nigeria produced no single megawatt of electricity and the 11 electricity distribution companies (Discos) got zero electricity load allocation during the period of the collapse, meaning that for that period on Thursday no part of Nigeria got power supply from the national grid.
The supply according to Disco sources was however restored by 3pm, and out of the 450MW that was due Abuja Electricity Distribution Company for instance, only about 50MW was given to it when the situation improved.
Abuja Disco had before the collapse got an allocation of 257.97MW. At that time, the national grid had about 2,243.2MW to distribute to the Discos.