Nigeria has again been thrown into darkness following another collapse of the national grid reported by the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) in the early hours of Thursday
The system, which takes generated electricity supply from Osogbo in Osun State to the national grid, snapped at about at 00:41 a.m. on Thursday.
The development immediately cut down the level of available electricity in the National grid to about 273 megawatts (MW) from a national average of about 4, 000 MW. It was gathered that the paltry supply managed to come from just two of the over 27 electricity generation systems across the country.
A number of distribution companies confirmed the collapse of the National grid after most of their power feeders shut down abruptly.
The Enugu Electricity Distribution Company PLC (EEDC) confirmed the systems collapse in a statement on Thursday by its spokesperson, Emeka Ezeh.
The statement titled: NOTICE OF TOTAL SYSTEM Collapse, reads: “The Enugu Electricity Distribution Company PLC (EEDC) wishes to inform her esteemed customers of a total system collapse which occurred at 12:40am today, 14th September,2023. This has resulted to the loss of supply currently being experienced across the network.
“Due to this development, all our interface TCN stations are out of supply, and we are unable to provide service to our customers in Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo States.
“We are on standby awaiting detailed information of the collapse and restoration of supply from the National Control Centre (NCC), Osogbo. Thank you.”
Ironically, the collapse of the system is coming days after the operator and manager of the electricity transmission infrastructure in the country, TCN, rolled out drums to celebrate stable and uninterrupted operations through the National grid for over 400 days.
In the early hours of Thursday, it was reported that only five of the generating plants were still supplying to the grid, with the bulk of the supply coming Jebba (240MW), Ibom Power (32.90MW) and Afam VI (0.70MW) 2021 only. No supply was recorded by the system from either Dadinkowa or Olorunsogo, as the two plants reported zero generation and supply to the grid.
TCN engineers battled all night to restore normalcy, but managed to bring back about 35MW initially, and later to about 193MW at about 3 a.m. and 273MW an hour later, before the system relapsed into total collapse.
It wwas clear what triggered the latest collapse as TCN was yet provide an update as at the time of this report.
The TCN spokesperson, Ndidi Mbah, did not respond to calls to her telephone for official reaction.
