Nigeria’s collapsed electricity grid fully restored – TCN

Earlier on Saturday, Nigeria’s electricity grid collapsed again, throwing several cities into darkness.

The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) says it has fully restored the collapsed national electricity grid.

The TCN General Manager, Public Affairs, Ndidi Mbah, disclosed this in a statement Saturday afternoon.

Earlier on Saturday, Nigeria’s electricity grid collapsed again, throwing several cities into darkness.

Electricity companies announced that the grid collapsed around 08:15 a.m. on Saturday. The latest collapse is coming days after the grid collapsed on Tuesday.

TCN, in its statement, said the national grid experienced a temporary disturbance at about 8:15 a.m., on Saturday.

“According to the report from the NCC, the bus section of a current transformer exploded at 330kV Jebba Transmission Substation and as expected, the protection system was activated, and this promptly opened the busbars to curtail the explosion, thereby preventing outbreak of fire and further damage to adjacent equipment.

“The action of the protection system led to a temporary disturbance on the grid.

“Our engineers at Jebba have successfully carried out switchings, isolating the faulty current transformer. They have equally reconfigured the busbar arrangement, restoring power supply to the station, and other parts of the grid,” Ms Mbah said.

On Tuesday, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the last election, Peter Obi, described Nigeria’s electricity grid collapse as “a national shame.”

Mr Obi described the incident as the failure of leadership and policy implementation.

In recent years, the power sector has experienced many challenges in areas of electricity policy enforcement, regulatory uncertainty, gas supply, transmission system constraints, and significant power sector planning shortfalls.

In November 2013, the federal government privatised all power generation and 11 distribution companies, with the government retaining the ownership of the transmission company. This was to improve efficiency in the sector.

However, since the privatisation, the grid has continued to collapse amid efforts to reposition the power sector.