Nigerians were thrown into nationwide outage at 10:51am Monday as the national grid collapsed to zero megawatts (MW). This is coming few days after electricity consumers said they had enjoyed better power supply.
The national electricity grid as of 10am on Monday had 3,712MW generated from 21 Generation Companies (GenCos) before it dropped to 0MW one hour after.
As at 12noon, only Afam IV was on the grid but with zero supply, according to the information from the System Operations unit at Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN).
Generation reached 4,100MW on Sunday after dipping to as low as 3,652MW with the frequency hovering between 49.04 Hertz (Hz) and 50.34Hz.
Since July 1 this year, consumers said power supply had improved across the country.
The national grid collapsed twice, in July and in August but was quickly restored and power supply improvement was sustained before the latest system collapse on Monday.
This is the seventh system collapse this year, much more than the three recorded last year.
The Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC) recently confirmed increment in its daily allocation to over 500MW from the usual 300MW it had distributed before then.
Though the national grid had not crossed 5,000MW, News Central’s investigations show that the level of load rejection especially around the DisCos’ networks had reduced drastically, with some customers recording 12 hours of stable electricity daily.
The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) had attributed the improvement in power supply nationwide to the partial activation of contracts that penalised operators for deliberate incompetence.
Energy experts say, while the cause of the collapse is yet to be ascertained, the cause of the crash could be as a result of a maintenance of the 330 kilovolts Jos–Bauchi transmission line maintenance slated for Monday.
Various DisCos Enugu, Kano, and Kaduna have notified their customers noting that efforts were under way to restore supply.