Nigeria’s Power grid again collapsed on Saturday with the generation dipping to an abysmal 0.80 Mega watt of electricity.
With this development, a nationwide power outage has hit Nigeria.
According to the website of Independent System Operator, an autonomous arm of the Transmission Company of Nigeria, the power plants contribution to the grid began to decline around 2pm to 2,797.16MW from the average 3,417.99MW around 1pm.
It further declined to 1,020.08 around 3pm before dramatically falling to 0.80 by 4pm.
The 0.80 was generated by the Trans-Amadi Power plant.
This is the fourth power grid collapse in 2024.
Confirming the development, Head, Corporate of Communications at Enugu Electricity Distribution Company, Emeka Ezeh, in a notice on Saturday, said the National Grid Collapse occurred around 15:09 hours on Saturday.
The development therefore disrupted
bulk electricity supply from the Transmission Company of Nigeria National Control Centre.
EEDC blamed the loss of power supply in the Southeast states – Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo on the incident.
The notice read, “This has resulted in the loss of supply currently being experienced across the network.
“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.
“We are on standby awaiting detailed information of the collapse and restoration of supply from the National Control Centre (NCC), Osogbo.”
The incident occurred a few days after TCN announced that electricity generation declined to 4,723.30 megawatts peak on July 4, 2024, compared to 4800mw in May.
In 2024 alone, Nigeria has recorded at least three system collapses. System collapse has occurred about 227 times in the last 14 years, TCN has disclosed.
This comes amid the April 3 and July 1 2024 electricity tariff hike for Band A customers, who are supposed to get 20-24 hours of power supply.
The electricity tariff for Band A was increased to N206.80 per kilowatt-hour from N66 kWh.