The Federal Government has said that the national grid which collapsed again yesterday has been recovered as it has solved the power outage being experienced across the country.
This was made known by the Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu, while briefing State House correspondents after a hybrid meeting of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) presided over by the Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, on Wednesday at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
Aliyu who said that the current power situation in the country was caused mainly by shortage of gas, revealed that efforts were being made to address the situation, adding that Nigeria had the capacity of 8,000Mw on the grid, embedded and captive.
What the Minister of Power is saying
Aliyu in his statement said, “The issue we are currently facing now was not only as a result of the level of water, which most of you captured in your reports; that is part of it; but it is not much from that angle.
“The more reason we are facing the situation now is as a result of the shortage of gas and some of the generators have to go into maintenance.
“It is a scheduled maintenance and it is supposed to be scheduled outage but we had not envisaged that we will have issues around vandalism of pipelines.
”Which the NNPC has addressed as you can see evidently everywhere, aviation fuel, and petrol in the filling stations; it is a combination of many factors.
“That compounded the problem we are having on the grid. The generators are not supplying because of lack of gas; so, I know some of you are aware; just two days ago, I summoned an emergency meeting which was unprecedented.’’
He said that for the first time, he brought in all the sector players—from NNPC, Agip, Shell to the regulator, NERC, the GENCOS like the Niger-Delta Power Company, the TCN and the ministry.
Aliyu said that the meeting, which involved the adviser to the president on infrastructure, lasted for the whole day trying to proffer a solution.
He said, “I challenged all of them; I said this is like a war situation; we need to find solutions; we need to come out with answers—quick ones, emergency solutions because the power on the grid has dropped due to those things that affected it—lack of gas, the maintenance that some of the generators are undergoing.
“So, you know technology, it is not up to you, that drop in the supply; the collapse of the grid, it triggered some response; some started to trip down and also caused the whole system to go down.
“We had the day before yesterday, we recovered it, we are on top of it; we have recovered it now; the grid is back; we are trying to get more megawatts to push on to the grid through the aforementioned meeting; everybody now is contributing to that meeting.
“Those things you have mentioned about bickering is no longer the cause because I have told them that we are one; nobody should blame anybody; because if you go on the blame game, how do you solve the problem? ’’
In case you missed it
- Nairametrics had earlier reported another collapse of the national grid resulting in blackout across the country, barely 24 hours after another collapse incident had occurred.
- The national grid collapse was said to have affected transmission stations with some of the affected DisCos announcing that they were already working with regulators to bring the grid back online.
