The latest development saw the capacity of the grid drop to zero Megawatts (MW) as of 8:16 am today (Saturday, October 19, 2024), with many states in the country experiencing total blackouts, according to data obtained from the Nigerian System Operator’s portal.

The Saturday grid collapse, the third this week, marked the eighth grid collapses in 2024 alone. The national power grid collapsed twice

last Monday, plunging the entire country into total blackouts for several hours.

Some states were in darkness for almost 48 hours as the power restoration was done in phases.

The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN),  had yet to issue an official statement on the incident at the time of this report.

Channels Television reported that on February 4, Nigeria experienced the first blackout of 2024 when the national grid collapsed at approximately 11:51 AM. The TCN-managed grid saw its capacity plummet from 2,407 megawatts to just 31MW by noon, and it completely shut down by 1 PM.

Although TCN is yet to speak on the latest collapse, the minister of power, Adebayo Adelabu on Friday said the grid collapses are almost inevitable in Nigeria given the deplorable state of the country’s power infrastructure.

Adelabu also said there is a need to have power grids in different regions or states to put an end to incessant grid collapses. Adelabu said this on Wednesday when he unveiled Hexing Livoltek, an electricity metre manufacturing company in the Lekki area of Lagos State.

According to him, having multiple power grids in each region and state would ensure stability. He noted that the decentralisation of the power sector would help the plan to build grids in each region, saying this was made possible by the Electricity Act signed by President Bola Tinubu in 2023.

“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,” he said.

“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 The minister emphasised that the situation would be inevitable without sufficient investment in the sector.