Nigeria’s national power grid has suffered another collapse, just one day after a partial collapse, resulting in a complete blackout across the country.
Data from the Nigerian System Operator’s portal (niggrid.org) indicated that power generation fell to zero megawatts at 11:30 a.m., impacting all 22 operational generation companies nationwide.
This latest collapse follows a partial grid failure that occurred just two days ago, as the Transmission Company of Nigeria continues to struggle with maintaining a stable electricity supply.
The country’s first major blackout of the year occurred on February 4, with further breakdowns recorded on August 5 and three times in October.
The October 14 incident led to a partial outage the next day, and a subsequent disturbance on October 19 nearly caused another complete collapse.
Following the collapse, Ikeja Electric released a statement stating that it is currently experiencing a system outage.
“Dear Esteemed Customer, please be informed that we experienced a system outage today 07 November 2024 at 11:29Hrs affecting supply within our network. Restoration of supply is ongoing in collaboration with our critical stakeholders. Kindly bear with us,” the statement read.
Nigerians have taken to social media to voice their frustration over the ongoing grid instability.
Adetayo Adegbamila, a prominent critic of the power sector, tweeted, “That’s actually the second time in the past 10 hours….It’s crazy what’s happening at @TCN_NIGERIA.”
His tweet highlights concerns over the frequency and duration of outages, which have significantly worsened in recent months.
Similarly, user @osunsinatolu criticised the government’s recent decision to remove fuel subsidies in light of the continued power issues.
“A country that has not fixed its electricity issue should not be removing fuel subsidy,” the tweet read.
“National grid issues every time and you can’t even afford to buy fuel. This is annoying.”
In another post, @timiPR remarked on the grid’s deteriorating reliability compared to previous years, stating, “This national grid used to collapse like once every 4-6 months back then but look at what is going on now. It goes off almost every week now. It went off 2 days ago, yeah? Now it’s down again.”
Blackouts are frequent in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with over 200 million people, due to ageing power infrastructure, vandalism and inadequate gas supply for its thermal plants, which account for over 75 percent of output.
Although Nigeria has the infrastructure to generate about 13,000 megawatts of power, its creaking grid can only distribute a third of it, forcing businesses and households to run costly fuel generators.
