Lagos, Abuja, Enugu, and other cities across the country experienced a blackout on Monday following the collapse of the national grid.
No fewer than four Distribution Companies (DISCOs) confirmed the development via social media, informing their customers of the situation in their respective domains.
They blamed the outage being experienced by consumers in various states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) on a general system collapse that occurred at about 10:40am.
In a statement by its Head of Corporate Communications, Emeka Ezeh, the Enugu Electricity Distribution Plc (EEDC) said it was on standby and awaiting a signal from the National Control Centre (NCC) for restoration of supply.
“The Enugu Electricity Distribution PLC (EEDC) wishes to inform her esteemed customers in the South East of a general system collapse which occurred this morning, Monday, 14th March 2022 at 10:40 am,” Ezeh said.
“This is the reason for the loss of supply currently being experienced across the network. Consequently, all our outgoing feeders are out and supply to our customers in Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu, and Imo States are affected by this development.”
On its part, the Eko Electricity Distribution Company (EKEDC) assured its customers that it was following up with the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) to restore power/
“Dear esteemed customer(s), we regret to inform you of a total system collapse on the national grid at 10:40 am today, leading to outages across our network.
“We are closely monitoring the situation with our TCN partners to determine the cause and a timeline for resolution. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience as we will keep you updated on the situation,” it said.
The Abuja Electricity Distribution Plc (AEDC) and Kaduna Electric also notified their customers about the outage in separate statements.
The national electricity grid crashed to zero following its loss of 1,100 megawatts (MW) from a 3,700MW peak generation earlier.
According to the grid operation trend, of the active 25 GenCos on the grid, 19 of them 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 GenCos.
At least 1,100MW was lost from the 3867MW peak generation when the five GenCos shut down. The affected plants include Azura-Edo IPP (Gas) which was generating 447MW earlier. Shiroro hydropower which had 300MW earlier went off; Trans-Amadi (Gas) lost 92MW; Alaoji NIPP (Gas) lost 75MW; Ihovbor NIPP (Gas) also lost 101MW.
