Minister of Power Adebayo Adelabu on Monday said that the country needs to establish grids across the regions to insulate the systems from each other if power stability must be achieved.
The Minister stated this while speaking to State House Correspondents after a closed door meeting with President Bola Tinubu at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
The Minister explained that the frequent collapse of the national power grid was as a result of the obsolete and dilapidated nature of the electricity infrastructures.
He said the current national grid infrastructures dates back 50 years ago, when they were constructed.
According to him. the transmission lines criss crossing Nigeria’s northern region are currently weak, as the towers are falling apart and the sub-stations are unable to aid power distribution to households.
The power Minister stressed that all of these factors have conspired to deny most citizens power supplies and yet compell them to pay exhorbitant electricity bills.
“Before the recent one, the last disturbance of the grid was about four months ago, which meant that we have been managing the grid. Let me tell you the truth of the matter is, we have old infrastructure. We have a national grid that is more than 50 years old. We have national grid whose transmission lines are weak, the towers are falling and the substations, the transformers are old. In fact, the transformer that actually exploded in Jeba was 47 years old. We’ve been trying to revamp this to change them, but they cannot all be changed overnight,” Adelabu said.
Only recently, the national grid collapsed no fewer than seven times between January and October, 2024, a development which has caused widespread condemnation and calls for urgent action.
The grid collapsed again in the South-East States of Anambra, Ebonyi and Enugu, as well as some states in the North-East and North-West regions of the country.
Adelabu who said he confided in the President about constraints of insecurity in restoring power to the northern region, disclosed that he also secured the approval of President Tinubu to deploy security personnel to guard workers tasked with the repair of some of the failed power infrastructures.
He revealed that personnel deployed to the north to restore power usually complained of insecurity, occassioned by bandit attacks.
“We discussed the root causes of these blackouts which basically is due to vandalization of the transmission lines of Shiro Kaduna line, which is the major line that supply electricity to the north, and the transmission Company of Nigeria, TCN, they already set out to fix this line.
“What they have asked for, which has been provided to them now is the security cover of the National Security Adviser through the Chief of Army Staff and Chief of Air Staff to enable them restore the damaged lines, we are optimistic that very soon this will be fully restored.
“We also explored the alternative line of providing light to the north through the Ikot Ekpene substation supplied from the Calabar plant, but the line got burnt along the line, and we are also trying to fix that.
“If you remember that at the last FEC one of the approvals for the ministry of power was actually the upgrade of the Siroro Kaduna transmission line, which is the major line that supply electricity to the northern part of the country.
“We already have approval for this. It is one of the oldest transmission lines that we have in Nigeria, and we believe that it requires an upgrade. And through the magnanimity of Mr. President and the Federal Executive Council, we got an approval to fix the line on a permanent basis. Once this is done, I believe that power to the North will be more stable than we’re experiencing right now.
“But before I end this, let me also state that the world is moving, this is the 21st century, and we believe that the most effective way of supplying uninterrupted, functional, stable and reliable electricity to the northern part of Nigeria is through our distributed power model, whereby each of the northern states will have an embedded utility, solar scale, solar source.
“All the 20 states will be insulated and immune from each other, we actually made progress in this as we have interested contractors and financiers that are ready to install 100 megawatt each for each of the 20 northern states, which is scalable to 50 megawatts at first, then upgraded to 100 megawatt.
“When we have this the power supply to the North will be reliable because of the advantage of sun that they have, where solar will be highly effective. The lowest number of hours that a state in the north enjoy in terms of sunshine is 10 hours. Once you have this we believe that the pressure on the national grid from the northern part of Nigeria will be lower, and our people, they will be able to enjoy better supplies,” the Minister noted.
