Nigerians will continue to experience national grid breakdowns as a result of the inadequate condition of the nation’s power infrastructure, according to Minister of Power Adebayo Adelabu.
Adelabu stressed the necessity of regional or state-level power grids in his speech on Wednesday in Lagos in order to overcome the regular grid breakdowns.
He emphasized that the establishment of several grids across various states and regions will help assure more stability in the power supply, noting that national grid breakdowns are almost inevitable under the current structure. Eyes Of Lagos reports,
Regarding the Electricity Act, which President Bola Tinubu signed in 2023, the Minister mentioned that the aim to construct networks in every region would be aided by the decentralization of the power industry.
“This Electricity Act has decentralized power,” Adelabu declared. It has made it possible for the state, local, and subnational governments to all take part in the production, transmission, and distribution of power. These days, all 36 states are impacted by any disruption to the single national grid that we all rely on. Such should not be the case. This will allow us to begin progressively establishing state grids and possibly regional organizations.
“And these grids will all be taken out and kept apart from one another. Therefore, if there is an issue with a specific grid, it will only impact the state in which it belongs, not the entire country. Consequently, this is one effect that the Electricity Act will have.
The Minister continued by stating that grid failure would occur if not enough money was invested in the power industry.
He emphasized that until Monday, there had not been a grid failure in the preceding four months.
“We keep talking about grid collapse,” Adelabu stated. Grid collapse, grid collapse, whether it’s a little trip-off, a partial trip-off, or a total failure.
This is almost inevitable as it is today, given the state of our 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. What we do now is to make sure that we manage it.
“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. So, what we work on now is how to improve our response time, to bring it up each time it collapses. 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.”
