Black out! Nigeria’s electricity grid collapses again after one year

Nigeria has been left in total blackout with no electricity as the national grid collapsed early morning of Thursday, September 14, 2023.

According to the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company (EEDC) Plc, the national grid crashed at approximately 12:40 am.

The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) spokeswoman, Ndidi Mbah, also verified the development to TheCable.

She stated that it is a system collapse but the company is working to restore it.

Priority on restoration

Mbah pointed out that prioritising the complete restoration of a system after a disorder is preferred over assigning guilt.

Meanwhile, Emeka Ezeh, head of corporate relations at EEDC in a statement on Thursday, 14th September 2023 noted that the system failure is to blame for the supply loss now experienced at the distribution company's interface.

The DisCo claimed that as a result of this situation, all of its interface TCN stations are out of stock and that it is unable to serve consumers in the states of Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu, and Imo.

It stated: “We are on standby awaiting detailed information of the collapse and restoration of supply from the National Control Centre (NCC), Osogbo.”

The TCN reports that this will be the first time in more than a year that the nation's electrical system will collapse.

In August 2023, the transmission firm reported that the electrical grid had sustained uninterrupted stability for more than 400 days.

In September 2022, Major DisCos announced the most recent system failure.

Notably, the TCN had reported a total of 46 grid collapses in the country spanning the period from 2017 to 2022.

Nigeria’s electricity grid collapsed 6 times in 8 days in January

Legit.ng had reported that the latest data from the Transmission Company of Nigeria has shown that the national electricity grid collapsed six times within a period of eight days this month, as reported in a Punch reports.

Statistics from an arm of the TCN, the Nigeria Electricity System Operator, showed that the incidents occurred between Monday, January 1 and Monday, January 8.

Legit.ng gathers that during this first system collapse which occurred between January 1 and 2, the country’s power generation crashed from 3,667.5 megawatts to 5.0 megawatts.