Reps begin inquest into frequent grid collapses

The Committee on Power of the House of Representatives has been instructed to look into the causes of the nation’s recurrent grid failures.

This came after Rep. Sani Bala (APC-Kano) won approval for a resolution of urgent public interest during a plenary session on Tuesday in Abuja.

Bala, who proposed the motion, noted that recent system instabilities along the transmission cables linking several producing stations have caused the national grid to repeatedly collapse.

Since the power sector was privatised in 2013, he claimed, the nation has had more than 100 national grid collapses.

He said that in 2022, there had been seven times as many national grid collapses as there had been in 2021, resulting in severe socioeconomic effects and nationwide power disruptions.

He also voiced alarm over the fact that the most recent power outage in the string had been rated as one of the worst in the nation.

This, in his opinion, showed that there was no plan in place and no spinning reserve created to prevent such accidents.

Read also:Reps probe NNPC’s structure, joint venture agreements

The lawmaker said that it was impossible for all of the nation’s major power plants—including the gas-fired Egbin, Utorogu, Chevron Oredo, Oben, Ughelli, and Chevron Escravos plants—to shut down simultaneously.

According to him, the Transmission Company of Nigeria’s (TCN) insufficient wheeling capacity, transmission lines, and spinning reserves may not be unrelated to the system collapse issue.

The refusal to expedite the building of digital control centres in place of the business’s current analogue system was one of the others, he claimed.

According to research numbers, the cost of producing power would be reduced by 30% if it were properly handled and transmitted for distribution to customers, according to Bala.

According to him, this would result in a commensurate drop in utility costs for the electrical supply sector.

Therefore, the House recommended the Committee on Power to look into the TCN’s ability to reverse the undesirable trend.

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