By Kolawole Ojebisi
The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) has explained the reason for the blackout pervading the North East, North West and parts of North Central of the country.
The company noted that the tripping of 330kV DC transmission line, caused the power outage in the affected areas. This explanation is contained in a statement issued by TCN’s General Manager on Public Affairs, Ndidi Mbah, on Tuesday.
According to the statement, the 330kV Ugwaji–Apir double circuit transmission lines1&2, tripped on Monday due to a fault, resulting in a forced power outage.
Mbah said: “At approximately 4:53am, the Ugwuaji–Markurdi 330kV Line 2 tripped and 243 MW on that line was transferred to Line 1 on the same route. At 4:58am, Line 1 also tripped, resulting in a total loss of 468 MW. By around 5:15am and 5:17am Line 1 and Line 2 were tried, but they all tripped immediately on the same relay indication
“Following the tripping incidents yesterday, two teams of linesmen were dispatched. One from the Apir Transmission Sub-region and another from the Enugu transmission, to expedite fault tracing along the 215 km route, which includes 245 transmission towers.”
She stated that throughout Monday, the Apir team patrolled the line, “navigating challenging terrains in search of the fault, reaching as far as the River Benue. They were unable to locate the cause of the tripping and have continued in the fault tracing early this morning”
She said the lines patrol team from Enugu Region of TCN were unable to commence lines patrol due to the ‘sit-at-home’ directive in the South East for October 21st and 22nd, 2024.
“This hindered not only the patrol team, but also made it difficult to refuel patrol vehicles for the long distance line trace. Arrangements were however made for security operatives to guide the team, who have commenced fault tracing this morning.”
“Currently, TCN has restored supply to the 132kV transmission line from New Haven to Apir, but the 330kV lines remain out of service, impacting power supply in the Northern region of the country. Sadly, the TCN Shiroro-Mando transmission line is also down due to security reasons, causing power outage in the North.”
According to her, TCN is making every effort to trace the cause of the outage to enable its engineers effect repairs and restore bulk power supply through both lines.
“We sincerely apologize to the government and electricity consumers in all the affected states and acknowledge that our patrol teams would have continued their search into the night yesterday, if not for the challenging terrain, which includes swamps and rivers, as well as insecure areas in the forest.
“We reconvened very early this morning with security operatives and have continued the fault tracing, to locate and address the cause of the line tripping.”
The country has been battling with incessant national grid collapse which often results in nationwide blackout.
The country has recorded at least eight cases of national grid collapse in 2024 alone with three of them happening in this month of October.
The most recent collapse happened on Saturday morning.
Reacting to the development, the Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, said the collapse is inevitable. He had ascribed the ugly development to deplorable state of the country’s power infrastructure.
Adelabu stressed that having multiple power grids in each region and state would ensure stability.
He noted that the decentralisation of the power sector would help the plan to build grids in each region, saying this was made possible by the Electricity Act signed by President Bola Tinubu in 2023.
