Why national electricity grid will continue to collapse – Tinubu’s minister

The Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, has acknowledged that Nigerians will continue to face national grid collapses due to the poor state of the country’s power infrastructure.

Speaking on Wednesday in Lagos, Adelabu emphasized the need for regional or state-level power grids to address the frequent grid failures.

He noted that national grid collapses are nearly unavoidable in the current system and stressed that establishing multiple grids across different regions and states would help ensure greater stability in the power supply.

On the Electricity Act signed by President Bola Tinubu in 2023, the Minister noted that the decentralisation of the power sector would help the plan to build grids in each region.

Adelabu 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 further, the Minister said grid collapse would be inevitable without sufficient investment in the power sector.

He pointed out that there was no grid collapse in the last four months until it happened again on Monday.

Adelabu said: “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.

“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.”