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

• Adebayo Adelabu, Nigeria’s Minister of Power, warns that the national electricity grid will continue to face collapses due to poor infrastructure.
• According to him, the system depends on a single national grid, making all 36 states vulnerable to disturbances that can lead to widespread outages.
• Adelabu emphasizes that ongoing grid collapses are nearly inevitable without significant investment in modernizing the power infrastructure.

Adebayo Adelabu, the Minister of Power, has revealed that Nigeria’s national electricity grid will remain vulnerable to collapses due to the poor state of the country’s power infrastructure.

Speaking in Lagos on Wednesday, Adelabu emphasized that without significant investment and modernization, grid failures will likely persist.

Adelabu outlined that the current structure, which relies on a single national grid, is problematic.

To address the issue, the minister proposed the development of regional or state-level grids, which would operate independently, reducing the widespread impact of failures.

He linked the plan to the Electricity Act signed by President Bola Tinubu in 2023, which decentralizes the power sector.

According to Adelabu, the Act empowers state and local governments to engage in electricity generation, transmission, and distribution.

“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.” he said.

Despite these plans, Adelabu acknowledged that grid collapses will continue unless there is substantial investment in the sector.

Reflecting on recent events, the minister pointed out that Nigeria had experienced no grid collapses in the past four months until a collapse occurred again on Monday.

“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,” he added.