POWER: National Grid Frequent Collapse Due to Old Infrastructure, Overcentralisation-Power Minister
Mr. Adebayo Adelabu, Nigeria’s Minister of Power has said that Nigeria will continue to experience the collapse of the national grid of electricity until the power infrastructure is unbundled.
Adelabu made the disclosure in Lagos on Wednesday at the commissioning of an electricity metre manufacturing firm, Hexing Livoltek at Lekki.
The minister noted that what leads to the perennial national grid collapse in Nigeria was due to the centrallised nature of Nigeria’s power infrastructure as well as the age of the electricity infrastructure.
He said that, the new Electricity Act of 2023 signed into law by President Bola Tinubu aims to tackle the problem of over centralization of Nigeria’s power infrastructure. The minister said that with the new Electricity Act, the country’s power infrastructure can now be regionalized or even run on state basis so that each region or state can be insulated from one another to the point that any fault as one point cannot affect the whole country as presently being experienced.
He said:
“This Electricity Act has decentralised power. It has enabled all the subnational governments, the state government and the local government, to be able to participate in the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity. We all rely on a single national grid today; if there is a disturbance of the national grid, it affects all 36 states. It shouldn’t be like that. This will enable us to start moving gradually towards having regional groups and possibly having state grids.
“And each of these grids will be removed and shielded from each other. So, if there’s a problem with a particular grid, only the state where it belongs will be affected, not the entire nation. So, this is one of the impacts this Electricity Act will have.
“We keep talking about grid collapse. Grid collapse, grid collapse, whether it’s a total collapse, partial collapse, or slight trip-off. This is almost inevitable as it is today, given the state of our power infrastructure, the infrastructure is in deplorable conditions, so why won’t you have trip-offs? Why won’t you have collapses, either total or partial? It will continue to remain like this until we can overhaul the entire infrastructure. What we do now is to make sure that we manage it.”
Speaking on the recent collapse of the grid, Adelabu stated that, “In the last four months, we have not heard of any grid collapse, except two days ago when we had a partial collapse that didn’t even last two hours. So, what we work on now is how to improve our response time, to bring it up each time it collapses. There are transformers of 60 years old, and 50 years old, and you’re expecting them to perform at the optimal rate. It is not possible. That is why we need a lot of investments in this infrastructure to bring them up to speed, to bring them up to the state that can give us a grid that will not collapse again.”
FACTSHEET reports that Nigeria’s power grid has collapsed nine times nine times in the last nine months with the latest collapse happening twice in less than two hours.