Homes, Businesses Suffer Blackout As National Grid Collapses

Blackouts being suffered by Nigerian homes and businesses got worse as the national power grid suffered another system collapse.

At least two of the electricity distribution companies in the country confirmed the collapse, which occurred early in the afternoon on Wednesday.

In a text message to its customers, Eko Electricity Distribution Company said, “Dear customer, the present outage is due to a system collapse on the National Grid. TCN (Transmission Company of Nigeria) assures us that supply will be restored shortly.”

The Head of Kano Electricity Distribution Company, Nura Shawai, said in a statement, “This is to kindly inform the general public of another system collapse based on information available to us. This occurred today 28/7/2021 at 12:20 pm, as the national grid was disrupted, resulting in national blackout.

“However, the grid controllers have assured that efforts towards restoring supply are in progress, promising speedy reconnection of Kano and other locations to the grid, as soon as the fault is rectified.”

The collapse of national grid, which is being managed by government-owned Transmission Company of Nigeria, has now become regular occurrence over the years amid a lack of spinning reserve that is meant to forestall such occurrences.

Spinning reserve is the generation capacity that is online but unloaded and that can respond within 10 minutes to compensate for generation or transmission outages.