Why Power Grid Collapse Inevitable –Minister

Posted by Nwa Diokpa Featured, Latest Headlines, News Across Nigeria Friday, October 18th, 2024

(AFRICAN EXAMINER – The Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, has stated that there is a need to have power grids in different regions or states to stop the unending grid collapses.

Adelabu made this known on Wednesday when he unveiled Hexing Livoltek which is an electricity meter manufacturing company in the Lekki area of Lagos State.

Adelabu also stated that the grid collapses are almost inevitable in Nigeria because of the deplorable state of the country’s power infrastructure.

He stated that having multiple power grids in each region and state would ensure stability.

He said: “This Electricity Act has decentralised 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. 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.

“And each of these grids will be removed and shielded from each other. So, if there’s a problem with a particular grid, only the state where it belongs will be affected, not the entire nation. So, this is one of the impacts this Electricity Act will have.”

Speaking more on the grid collapse, he stated that the situation would be inevitable without sufficient investment in the sector.

“We keep talking about grid collapse. Grid collapse, grid collapse, whether it’s a total collapse, partial collapse, or slight trip-off. 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,” he said.

According to him, there was no grid collapse during the last four months until it happened again on Monday.

“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,” he said.