Abuja - September 14 - Mediaage NG News – On Wednesday, levels of power generated in Nigeria fell to zero megawatts, causing complete system collapse and widespread power cuts across the country on Thursday.
This was the most serious outage for over a year, since the grid collapsed at least four times in 2022, incidents the authorities blamed on technical hitches.
However, connections from Wednesday’s fall were gradually restored throughout Thursday.
Grid power supplies are often erratic in Nigeria, located in the west of Africa, despite its role as a major oil and gas producer.
The country’s Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu said a transmission line connecting two power plants in Niger state suffered an explosion after a fire, thus tripping the grid.
“The fire has been fully arrested and over half of the connections are now up and the rest will be fully restored in no time”, the BBC quotes Mr Adelabu in a statement.
A number of electricity distribution companies told customers on X, the social media platform formally known as Twitter, that the most recent blackouts were a result of a “total system collapse”.
Less than 50% of Nigeria’s population has access to a regular power supply. Most homes and businesses have resorted to generators, inverters and other sources of electricity so as not to be dependent on the national grid.
However, many of these now come at a higher cost following the government’s removal of fuel subsidies last May.
The theoretical maximum amount of power Nigeria could produce is 12,500MW, but the country normally produces just a quarter of that, the Reuters news agency reports.
According to the BBC, on Thursday, at around 10:30 local time (09:30 GMT), power levels had risen from zero to 273MW, which was still well below the daily average of 4,100MW, data from the Transmission Company of Nigeria showed.