Minister of Power reveals cause of frequent National Grid collapse

Adebayo Adelabu, Minister of Power, has attributed the frequent system failure at the national grid to Nigeria’s outdated power infrastructure

Minister of Power reveals cause of frequent National Grid collapse

Speaking at the unveiling of Hexing Livoltek, a new electricity meter manufacturing company in Lagos, Adelabu emphasized the importance of increased investment in power infrastructure.

“The infrastructure is in deplorable conditions, so why won’t you have trip-offs? Why won’t you have collapses, either total or partial? It will continue to remain like this until we can overhaul the entire infrastructure,” Adelabu said.

He noted that managing the grid has improved, citing a four-month period without a collapse until a recent partial collapse that was resolved within two hours.

“In the last four months, we have not heard of any grid collapse, except two days ago when we had a partial collapse that didn’t even last two hours. What we work on now is how to improve our response time to bring it up each time it collapses,” he said.

Adelabu highlighted the age of Nigeria’s power infrastructure, stating that some transformers are 60 years old and cannot perform optimally.

“There are transformers of 60 years old, and 50 years old, and you’re expecting them to perform at the optimal rate. It is not possible. That is why we need a lot of investments in this infrastructure to bring them up to speed, to bring them up to the state that can give us a grid that will not collapse again.”

The minister advocated for decentralizing the power sector, proposing multiple regional grids to prevent nationwide power failures.

“This Electricity Act has decentralized 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.”

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