By Abiola Olawale
The Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, has announced that the Federal Government is making significant progress towards enhancing its energy capacity, with plans to inject an additional 150 megawatts (mw) into the national grid by the end of 2024.
Adelabu who spoke during a press briefing after a closed-door meeting with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and President Bola Tinubu at the Presidential Villa in Abuja, said the initiative is part of the government’s broader efforts to improve electricity supply.
The New Diplomat reports that the minister’s comment came after the national grid collapsed for the 12th time in the year, plunging millions of homes into darkness.
However, despite the persistent collapse, Adelabu assured Nigerians of a better experience going forward.
According to him, the upgrade will be made due to the successful completion of a pilot phase of the Presidential Power Initiative (PPI). He stated: “We have completed the pilot phase of this project, up to 80%. This involves the importation, installation, and commissioning of 10 power transformers and 10 powermobile substations. They’ve been imported. They’ve been installed, and lots of them have been commissioned. We have just about two left to be commissioned before the end of the year.”
“The positive impact of this is that it has added nothing less than 750 megawatts to our transmission grid capacity, which is why the relative stability that we are seeing in the grid today is the direct positive impact of the pilot stage completion.
“So, we believe that before the end of the year, an additional 150 megawatts capacity is going to be added upon completion of the entire pilot phase.
“When we are done with the Phase One project in the transmission, the entire grid will not remain the same, and that’s why we are telling Nigerians that this is a very old grid. It’s quite fragile and it’s dilapidating.
“We need to revamp the entire grid for us to be sure of stability going forward.”
This comes as several Nigerians have expressed their frustrations about the repeated national grid collapse, as businesses, homes, and critical infrastructure continue to be affected by the nation’s unreliable electricity supply.
It would be recalled that the national grid collapsed on October 17, 2024. Also, the national grid collapsed on October 15, 2024. This came hours after the national grid had collapsed on October 14, 2024.
Also, the national grid collapsed on August 5, 2024.
The country was also plunged into darkness due to the grid failure on 6 July 2024.
Also, the country suffered another nationwide blackout on March 28. On April 14, the nation’s electricity grid experienced another system collapse.
The national electricity grid, on February 4, collapsed for the first time in 2024.
