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George Oshogwe Ogbolu
Guest
The National Electricity Grid has suffered another collapse and disturbance in 2024, with the latest incident making it the 10th.
Naija News reports that the National Grid Agency disclosed the latest setback in a post on its official X handle.
Below is a full list of dates and times when the national grid experienced collapses or disruptions in 2024:
- Sunday, February 4 – Collapse
- Thursday, March 28 – Collapse
- Monday, April 15 – Collapse
- Saturday, July 16 – Collapse
- Monday, August 5 – Collapse
- Monday, October 14 – Collapse
- Tuesday, October 15 – Partial Collapse
- Saturday, October 19 – Disturbance
- Tuesday, November 5 – Disturbance
- Thursday, November 7 – Setback
Meanwhile, the Federal Government has disclosed that a deficient maintenance culture and outdated and insufficient equipment are significant factors contributing to the frequent collapses of the national power grid observed in recent months.
Nafisatu Asabe Ali, the Chairperson of the investigative committee examining the causes of the grid failures while presenting a report yesterday at Ministry headquarters in Abuja, noted that the excessive voltage of electricity exceeding the equipment’s capacity was responsible for the blackouts experienced on October 14 and 19, 2024.
According to her, the investigative team identified similar issues and challenges affecting all stations during their inquiry.
She indicated that the team investigated the grid collapse incidents on October 14 and 19, discovering that the failure of lightning arrestors at the Jebba and Oshogbo transmission stations, as well as an explosion of a current transformer at Jebba Station, were the causes of both events.
Ali said: “For the event on the 14th, lightning arrestors in Jebba and Oshogbo shattered. The one in Jebba was for the shunt reactor and this was caused by high voltage. Subsequently, we had the tripping of multiple 330kV lines. It kept going until it became major.
“The remote cause of that is the unavailability of the second reactor in Jebba, and that is because Jebba, by the design of the network and sometimes the topology of the network at a particular time is very prone to high voltage.
“We had two shunt reactors in Jebba before this event, however, one packed up. It is faulty, and so the voltage rose to about 400KV, which is beyond the threshold. High voltage degrades equipment insulation.
“If you expose equipment to high voltages for a long time, it degrades the insulation. And, of course, there’s a risk of failure. So, that was a remote cause for that. But the underlying causes are aged equipment. In our findings, we confirmed that Jebba was commissioned in 1968. Some of the equipment was commissioned alongside the substation. So, aged equipment. And maintenance culture is also an issue.”
The committee identified several factors impacting management, including vandalism of power infrastructure, insufficient availability of governors at power generation facilities, disorganized maintenance schedules, and inadequate human resources.
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