Top to bottom: After crashing from 3,700 megawatts to zero on Democracy Day, Nigeria’s national grid bounces back with 88 megawatts only
About 19 hours after June 12’s system collapse, the Nigerian national grid is yet to recover to its previous level of 3,700 megawatts (MW) as only the Jebba hydropower plant had 88MW on the grid on Monday afternoon.
Although the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) is battling to manage the grid, stakeholders in the power sector are yet to be briefed on the immediate cause of the system collapse which occurred for the fourth time this year.
The system collapse incident of Democracy Day lasted for about three hours from 6:45 pm till around 10 pm when power consumers began confirming the restoration of supply in parts of Lagos and Abuja as of 12am.
System collapse occurrences dropped since 2021 with four recorded then and four so far this year. This has been a relief from the over 20 incidents in the past, but there are fears that the situation is not managed, the incident may climb higher this year.
Records from the Independent System Operator (ISO), a segment of TCN on Monday indicated that the grid had 1,700MW of electricity as of 10 am which then rose to slightly over 2,000MW by 11 am. However, by 1 pm, the grid which was recovering plunged further to 512MW as several Generation Companies (GenCos) went off the system.
In another apparent sign of a near system collapse, the grid had just 88MW of electricity from Jebba hydro as of 2 pm acting as a spinning reserve to keep the grid on, with many residents confirming power outages in Abuja, Nasarawa and Niger environs.
The Distribution Companies (DisCos) were expected to get 2,377.14MW of electricity but could not due to the system disturbance.
