Nigeria’s power grid completely blacked out on Thursday morning following a fire that caused an explosion, affecting power supply across Africa’s biggest economy.
Nigeria’s Minister for Power, Adebayo Adelabu, said a fire had caused an explosion on a transmission line connecting two power generation plants in north-central Niger state, tripping the grid.
“The fire has been fully extinguished, and over half of the connections are now up, and the rest will be fully restored in no time,” Adelabu said in a statement.
Power generation in the major oil- and gas-producing country fell to zero in the early hours of Thursday and had risen to 273 megawatts by 10:30, still well below the daily average of 4.1 gigawatts of generation.
Grid power supply is notoriously erratic in the country.
It is not the first time that Africa’s most populous country has suffered a grid collapse in recent times.
Last year June Nigeria also had a nationwide blackout.
The Guardian in Nigeria said that the grid, operated by the Transmission Company of Nigeria, had again collapsed.
At the time, the paper reported that “the grid has collapsed about 10 times this year (2022) as electricity generation remained at about 2 000 MW for the past three months.”
Nigeria only produces about a quarter of its 12.5GW of installed capacity. – TechCentral
