Nigeria has once again been plunged into darkness following the collapse of the national grid on Saturday, October 19, 2024.
This marks the third grid collapse in just one week, leaving many Nigerians in a state of frustration and confusion.
The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) has confirmed that the collapse occurred around 8:15 a.m. due to a transformer explosion at the Jebba Transmission Substation.
According to a statement from TCN, a current transformer at the 330kV Jebba Substation exploded, causing a major disturbance on the grid.
The company explained that the protection system was activated immediately, preventing the fire from spreading to nearby equipment.
Despite this, the damage was enough to shut down the grid temporarily.
The explosion triggered a complete blackout, with many states across the country left without power.
This collapse has intensified the already severe power challenges that Nigerians have been grappling with.
As of 9:20 a.m., data from the Nigerian System Operator’s portal showed that the grid had recorded zero megawatts, meaning no electricity was being transmitted to any of the country’s eleven distribution companies (DisCos).
For many Nigerians, this latest grid failure is yet another blow in their daily struggle to access reliable electricity.
“This is becoming unbearable,” said a business owner in Lagos. “The cost of fuel is already sky-high, and now with these frequent grid failures, we are being forced to run on generators almost full-time. It’s killing our businesses.”
The TCN has assured Nigerians that its engineers at Jebba quickly moved into action after the explosion.
They successfully isolated the faulty transformer and reconfigured the busbar arrangement to restore power supply to the station and other parts of the grid.
Ndidi Mbah, the General Manager of Public Affairs at TCN, confirmed this in a public statement released on Saturday afternoon.
However, for many Nigerians, these assurances do little to calm their frustration.
The grid’s repeated failures in such a short period have led to widespread concerns about the reliability of the country’s power infrastructure.
This is the eighth time the national grid has collapsed this year, with three failures occurring in just the past week.
Each blackout has a profound impact on businesses, industries, and households across the country, leading to huge financial losses and disrupting daily life.
The ongoing power crisis has raised questions about the effectiveness of Nigeria’s power sector privatization, which was supposed to solve these problems.
In November 2013, the government privatized the country’s power generation and distribution sectors, while retaining control of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN).
The idea was that private companies would be more efficient in managing power supply, while the government would oversee the transmission of electricity across the national grid.
However, more than a decade later, the results have been far from promising.
