By Okechukwu Nnodim
Nigeria has witnessed its sixth power grid collapse of 2024, as electricity generation on the system collapsed from 2,583.77MW at 2am on Monday to 64.7MW around 3 am.
Nigeria generates an average of 4,000MW of electricity for an estimated 200 million citizens across the country.
But this is hardly sustainable, as the grid continues to record incessant collapse due to gas supply constraints, transmission infrastructure vandalism, and liquidity crisis, among others.
Data from the Independent System Operator, an arm of the Transmission Company of Nigeria, showed that only one electricity generation company, Ibom Power, was active at the time of the grid collapse on Monday morning.
Power generation on the grid crashed further to 44.5MW around 4am, before rising to 132.29MW an hour later.
The grid collapse was confirmed by Jos Electricity Distribution Company.
The Head, Corporate Affairs, JEDC, Dr Friday Elijah, in a notice to customers, said, “The current outage being experienced within our franchise states is a result of loss of power supply from the national grid.
“The loss of power supply from the national grid occurred in the early hours at about 0242hours of today, Monday, April 15, 2024, hence the loss of power supply on all our feeders.”
Elijah, however, expressed hope that the grid would be restored for normal power supply to electricity consumers.
On February 5, 2024, The PUNCH reported that power generation on the national grid crashed to 59.9MW around 12 pm on February 4, 2024, as the country’s grid witnessed a nationwide collapse.
The report stated that data obtained from the Federal Ministry of Power showed that electricity generation on the grid plunged from 2,658.75MW at 11 am to 59.9MW by 12 noon on February 4, 2024, as power distributors lost supply from the grid.
This led to widespread blackouts across the country, as power distribution companies blamed it on the collapse of the grid managed by the Transmission Company of Nigeria, an agency of the Federal Government.
