The Transmission Company of Nigeria in reaction to the sixth grid collapse of 2024, witnessed on Monday has said that such occurrence will continue if gas used to power the grid continues to be in short supply.
Nigeria witnessed its sixth power grid collapse of 2024, on Monday, as electricity generation on the system collapsed from 2,583.77 megawatts at 2:a.m to 64.7MW around 3:a.m before the grid was restored later in the day.
Although, the Transmission Company of Nigeria attributed the cause of Monday’s grid collapse to a fire incident, it had consistently blamed gas shortage for power generation and the vandalism of power infrastructure for the recurrent cases of grid collapse in Nigeria.
Nigeria generates an average of 4,000MW of electricity for an estimated 200 million citizens across the country.
But this is hardly sustainable, as the grid continues to record incessant collapse due to gas supply constraints, transmission infrastructure vandalism, and liquidity crisis, among others.
The grid collapse was confirmed by Jos Electricity Distribution Company. The Head, Corporate Affairs, JEDC, Dr Friday Elijah, in a notice to customers, said, “The current outage being experienced within our franchise states is a result of loss of power supply from the national grid.
“The loss of power supply from the national grid occurred in the early hours at about 0242 hours of today, Monday, April 15, 2024, hence the loss of power supply on all our feeders.
“This resulted in the loss of supply to all our interface TCN stations.
Consequently, we were unable to provide service to our customers in Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu, and Imo states”.
The collapse of Nigeria’s power grid is now a recurrent phenomenon, as the system has remained unstable, leading to incessant cases of grid collapse.