The Ibadan and Eko Electricity Distribution Companies have told their customers to prepare for nationwide power outage as national power grid collapsed.
The national power grid which was announced to have collapsed yesterday, causing a nationwide outage as the entire system crashed due to the loss of 1,100 megawatts from a 3,700mw peak generation earlier recorded.
This was just as airline operators in Nigeria yesterday warned that they have only three days left to shut down operations over lingering scarcity of aviation fuel.
The Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company disclosed today via a release made available to ODUDUWA NEWS this afternoon, “the system was yet to pick up load, according to a grid operations report, which showed that just three Generation Companies (Gencos) were trying to restart, but were yet to generate any energy”.
According to the grid operation trend, of the active 25 Gencos on the grid, 19 were producing power as of 6am, when the grid had 3,867.60MW, but that began to reduce gradually until it dropped to 2,761.20MW by 10am after six Gencos went down, leaving just 13, before crashing to zero at 10.40 am.
It was learnt that at least 1,100MW was initially lost from the 3,867MW peak generation before the Gencos started shutting down.
The analysis showed that the affected plants included Azura-Edo IPP (Gas), which was generating 447MW earlier, and Shiroro hydropower, which had 300MW earlier and later went off. Trans-Amadi (Gas) lost 92MW, Alaoji NIPP (Gas) lost 75MW, while Ihovbor NIPP (Gas) lost 101MW.
As of today, the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), which manages the power grid, had yet to comment on the immediate cause of the collapse, although, it was the first in the year.
The blackout had worsened throughout the country around 10:40am, after the national grid collapsed, with the Eko Electricity Distribution Company confirming the incident in a text message to its customers.