Nigerians Lament Nationwide Blackout As Power Grid Collapse effect lingers

In what is seen as a total blackout, worsened throughout the country around 10:40am, Monday March 14 after the national grid collapsed, with the Eko Electricity Distribution Company, confirming the incident in a text message to its customers.

Consumers who are yet to come to terms with Power tariff hikes that is not commensurate with the amount of power distributed  have continued to lament the epileptic electricity supply across the country. In Lagos south west Nigeria consumers have been greeted on a regular basis with power shortages which has also affected businesses in the commercial nerve centre.

The Nigerian national power grid collapsed , causing a nationwide outage as the entire system crashed due to the loss of 1,100 megawatts from a 3,700mw peak generation earlier recorded.

For the power sector, as at March 14, the system was yet to pick up load, according to a grid operations report, which showed that just three Generation Companies (Gencos) were trying to restart, but were yet to generate any energy.

News report gathered said  Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu, called an emergency meeting yesterday to resolve all outstanding issues with the stakeholders in the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI) as a result of the worsening power situation.

According to the grid operation trend, of the active 25 Gencos on the grid, 19 were producing power as of 6am, when the grid had 3,867.60MW, but that began to reduce gradually until it dropped to 2,761.20MW by 10am after six Gencos went down, leaving just 13, before crashing to zero at 10.40 am.

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

The analysis showed that the affected plants included Azura-Edo IPP (Gas), which was generating 447MW earlier, and Shiroro hydropower, which had 300MW earlier and later went off. Trans-Amadi (Gas) lost 92MW, Alaoji NIPP (Gas) lost 75MW, while Ihovbor NIPP (Gas) lost 101MW.

As of yesterday, the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), which manages the power grid, had yet to comment on the immediate cause of the collapse, although, it was the first in the year.