National Power Grid Suffers 2nd Collapse in 2 Days

The national power grid has suffered another collapse resulting in a nationwide outage.

The latest incident is said to have affected the entire system as the country’s grid dropped from 3,700mw to 1,100mw.

Nigerians were hoping the power system was to pick up yesterday, March 15 in line with an update from operators which showed that just three Generation Companies (Gencos) were trying to restart, but were yet to generate any energy.

THISDAY reported that the Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu called an emergency meeting yesterday, Tuesday to resolve all outstanding issues with the stakeholders in the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI).

This came as a result of worsening power situation.

According to the grid operation trend, of the active 25 Gencos on the grid, 19 were producing power as of 6:00am, when the grid had 3,867.60MW.

Sadly power began to reduce gradually until it dropped to 2,761.20MW by 10:00am after six Gencos went down, leaving just 13, before crashing to zero at 10.40 am.

THISDAY learnt that at least 1,100MW was initially lost from the 3,867MW peak generation before the Gencos started shutting down.

The blackout had worsened throughout the country around 10:40am, after the national grid collapsed, with the Eko Electricity Distribution Company, confirming the incident in a text message to its customers.

Announcements by some of the distribution companies:

A message sent out by the Eko Electricity Company to its customers reads;

‘‘Dear Esteemed Customers, We would like to inform you of another system collapse on the National Grid which occurred at 5:10pm today. We are monitoring the situation and will continue to provide updates. Once again we apologise for the inconvenience.”