Incessant power grid collapse inevitable — Adelabu

The Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, on Wednesday, said grid collapses are almost inevitable in Nigeria given the deplorable state of the country’s power infrastructure

Adelabu stated this at the unveiling of Hexing Livoltek, an electricity meter manufacturing company in the Lekki area of Lagos State.

According to him, power grids in different regions or states are needed to prevent incessant grid collapses as having multiple power grids in each region and state would ensure stability.

He noted that the decentralisation of the power sector would help the plan to build grids in each region, saying this was made possible by the Electricity Act signed by President Bola Tinubu in 2023.

“This Electricity Act has decentralised 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. 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.

“We keep talking about grid collapse. Grid collapse, grid collapse, whether it’s a total collapse, partial collapse, or slight trip-off. This is almost inevitable as it is today, given the state of our power infrastructure, the infrastructure is in deplorable conditions, so why won’t you have trip-offs? Why won’t you have collapses, either total or partial? It will continue to remain like this until we can overhaul the entire infrastructure. What we do now is to make sure that we manage it,” he said.

Adelabu maintained that there was no grid collapse in the last four months until it happened again on Monday.

He said, “In the last four months, we have not heard of any grid collapse, except two days ago when we had a partial collapse that didn’t even last two hours. So, what we work on now is how to improve our response time, to bring it up each time it collapses. There are transformers of 60 years old, and 50 years old, and you’re expecting them to perform at the optimal rate. It is not possible. That is why we need a lot of investments in this infrastructure to bring them up to speed, to bring them up to the state that can give us a grid that will not collapse again.”

It would recalled that the national grid collapsed twice in 24 hours after electricity distribution companies across the country announced the grid collapsed around 6:48 p.m., resulting in the loss of power supply across their networks.

“Consequently, due to this development, all our interface TCN stations are out of supply, and we are unable to provide services to our customers in Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu, and Imo States.”

Meanwhile, the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), on Tuesday,  announced that the national grid has successfully restored about 90 per cent of bulk power supply across its substations nationwide, following a system collapse that plunged the country into a blackout.

TCN spokesperson, Ndidi Mbah disclosed this information in a statement explaining that bulk power supply has been restored to the Abuja axis and other major distribution load centres throughout the country.