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He said this at the unveiling of Hexing Livoltek, an electricity meter manufacturing company in the Lekki area of Lagos State.
Nigeria’s Power Minister, Adebayo Adelabu has stated that grid collapses in Nigeria are inevitable.
He said this at the unveiling of Hexing Livoltek, an electricity meter manufacturing company in the Lekki area of Lagos State.
According to him, the infrastructure state of the electricity sector makes grid collapse a common thing in Nigeria.
“We keep talking about grid collapse. Grid collapse, grid collapse, whether it’s a total collapse, partial collapse, or slight trip-off. This is almost inevitable as it is today, given the state of our power infrastructure.
“The infrastructure is in deplorable conditions, so why won’t you have trip-offs? Why won’t you have collapses, either total or partial? It will continue to remain like this until we can overhaul the entire infrastructure. What we do now is to make sure that we manage it,” he stated
“In the last four months, we have not heard of any grid collapse, except two days ago when we had a partial collapse that didn’t even last two hours. So, what we work on now is how to improve our response time, to bring it up each time it collapses.
“There are transformers of 60 years old, and 50 years old, and you’re expecting them to perform at the optimal rate. It is not possible. That is why we need a lot of investments in this infrastructure to bring them up to speed, to bring them up to the state that can give us a grid that will not collapse again,” he further stated.
This development comes despite billions of naira unutilised out of the capital expenditure released to the Power Ministry.
SaharaReporters reported on Wednesday that despite the challenges facing Nigeria’s power sector, over N110 billion from the funds released had not been utilised since 2020 based on budget performance report published by the Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning.
Records show that in 2020, the sum of N68.6 billion was released for the sector’s capital needs, however, only N44.2 billion was utilised as of the third quarter of the year ending in September.
In 2021, N164.3 billion was the amount released while N122.2 billion was utilised.
In 2022, the sum of N75 billion was released while N30.8 billion was utilised.
Nigeria also faces poor budgetary releases for rural electrification and provision of electricity generally.
SaharaReporters reported on Monday that the national grid had collapsed, triggering nationwide blackout as distribution companies declared lack of supply to their customers.
