Nigeria’s national power grid collapsed again on Thursday, November 7, marking the second failure in just three days and the tenth since February 2024.
This latest outage plunged several regions into darkness, disrupting businesses, essential services, and daily life across the country.
According to data from the Nigerian System Operator’s portal, power generation dropped to an unprecedented zero megawatts at 11:30 a.m., affecting all 22 operational generation companies (GenCos) nationwide. Earlier this week, a similar collapse led to widespread outages, with power restored to key areas only after several hours.
This blackout is another blow to Nigeria’s struggling power sector, which has been plagued by instability, insufficient capacity, and frequent grid disturbances. The repeated failures have fueled public frustration and raised concerns over the stability of Nigeria’s power infrastructure.
In the past ten months, Nigeria has faced frequent outages, exposing systemic issues within the country’s electricity network. The ICIR reports that each failure affects households, businesses, and critical sectors like healthcare, where a consistent power supply is essential.
This latest collapse adds to an increasingly alarming trend. The first major blackout of the year occurred on February 4, 2024, when the grid’s capacity fell from 2,407 megawatts to just 31 megawatts by midday, eventually reaching zero. Since then, breakdowns have recurred, with collapses on August 5 and three times in October. Notably, the October 14 collapse was followed by a partial failure the next day, and another disturbance occurred on October 19, narrowly avoiding a complete collapse.
While TCN has yet to issued comments on the collapse, Ikeja Electric and Jos Electricity Distribution PlC, have confirmed the collapsee, nothing that the current outage being experienced within their franchise states is a result of loss of power supply from the national grid.
“The current outage being experienced within our franchise States is a result of loss of power supply from the national grid. The loss of power supply from the national grid occurred this morning at about 1128 hours of today, Thursday, 7th November 2024, hence the loss of power supply on all our feeders.
“We hope to restore normal power supply to our esteemed customers as soon as the grid supply is restored back to normalcy,” a statement by the Head, Corporate Communications of Jos DISCOS, Friday Adakole Elijah, read in part.
(ICIR)
