National Grid Causing Nationwide Blackouts Restored – Power Minister, Abubakar Aliyu

Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu says the National Grid that suffered a collapse on Monday has now been restored and efforts are being made to put power into it.

National Power Grid Restored

KanyiDaily recalls that the Federal Government had summoned an emergency meeting with stakeholders in the power sector due to the low electricity generation and the collapse of the national grid which lead to widespread blackout across the country.

Aliyu spoke to State House Correspondents on Wednesday after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting presided over by Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo.

The Minister, who disclosed that recent collapse of the national grid has been restored, explained that the power outage across the nation is due to several challenges which are already being addressed.

He said, “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 to maintenance.

“It is scheduled maintenance, and it is supposed to be scheduled outage, but we had not envisaged that we will have issues around vandalisation of pipelines, which the NNPC has addressed as you can see 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.

“We have recovered the grid now. The grid is back, and we are trying to get more megawatts to push on the grid. We have set up small committees all geared towards getting more megawatts to put on the grid.

“Basically, the problem is around gas. You need to have a gas contract between generating companies and gas suppliers — some are from contracts, some are not. We are looking into this and have proffered some solutions in some few days to mature”.

The minister also spoke on the issue of the quantity of generated electricity in the country, saying “we have the capacity of 8,000 megawatts — the one on the grid, embedded and captive”.

“If you combine all of them, you will get these problems that we are encountering. We are on top of the challenge, and very soon, we will come out of it,” he added.

KanyiDaily recalls that Abubakar Aliyu had previously blamed the low water levels in the hydro dams for the erratic power supply in the country.