Darkness Hits Nigerians As National Grid Collapses Twice In 48 Hours

Nigerians have taken to social media to voice their frustration of having to endure darkness as the national grid collapsed for the second time in less than 48 hours.

With the country plunged into another round of blackout, available reports showed that the system glitch happened around 11:28 am on Thursday.

According to an insider source within the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), this latest collapse comes on the heels of a partial grid failure about two days ago, as the company continues to struggle with maintaining a stable electricity supply across the country.

Besides being the second incident within this week, the grid collapse is the 10th overall in year 2024.

The competent source hinted that from the Independent System Operator (ISO), an autonomous arm of TCN, the grid only hosted about 3.7 megawatts of electricity as of 12 noon on Thursday, November 7, 2024.

Also, a check on the ISO’s website indicated that the generation plants only produced an average of 2,709.45 megawatts of electricity around 11 am, even as the TCN is yet to issue an official statement conveying reasons for the latest grid collapse.

Forefront News notes that the first major blackout of this year happened on February 4, with further collapses witnessed on August 5 and thrice in the month of October.

The October 14 incident led to a partial outage the next day, as well as subsequent disruption on October 19 that almost resulted in another total collapse of the grid.

Reacting to the development, he Jos Electricity Distribution Company (JEDC) said the current outage being experienced within its franchise was due to loss of power supply from the national grid.

Offering an update on the current position of things, JEDC said; “The loss of power supply from the national grid occurred this morning at about 11:28 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”.

On its part, Ikeja Electric issued a statement explaining the current system outage thus; “Dear Esteemed Customer, please be informed that we experienced a system outage today 07 November 2024 at 11:29Hrs affecting supply within our network.

“Restoration of supply is ongoing in collaboration with our critical stakeholders. Kindly bear with us”.