By Izunna Okafor, Awka
Nigerians have been thrown into nationwide power outage, following the collapse of the national grid.
This system collapse, which occured at about 3:9pm on Saturday afternoon (July 6) is coming barely three months after similar incident occured, making it the fourth time the entire nation has been thrown into blackout in just 2024 alone.
Announcing this to newsmen on Saturday, the Head, Corporate of Communications at Enugu Electricity Distribution Company, Emeka Ezeh said the bulk electricity supply from the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) National Control Centre has consequently been disrupted.
According to him, the situation is the reason for the loss of power supply currently being experienced across the network.
“Due to this development, all our interface TCN stations are out of supply, and we are unable to provide services to our customers in Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu, and Imo states.
“We are on standby awaiting detailed information of the collapse and restoration of supply from the National Control Centre (NCC), Osogbo,” he said.
The national grid system, operated by the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), has collapsed about 227 times in the last 14 years, and about four times in 2024 alone, resulting in nationwide blackout at each occurrence, pending when it is fixed and power restored and transmitted to the DISCOS, who resume distribution to the electricity consumers.
This reporter, Izunna Okafor, gathered that the latest collapse of the national grid is coming days after TCN announced that electricity generation declined to 4,723.30 megawatts peak on July 4, 2024, compared to 4800mw in May.
This is also coming amid the April 3 and July 1 2024 electricity tariff hikes for Band A customers, who are supposed to get between 20 to 24-hour power supply daily, as their electricity tariff rose from N66 per kilowatt-hour to N206.80 kWh.
