Why National grid collapsed – Minister

The Minister of Power, Mr Abubakar Dr Aliyu, said Wednesday that collapse of national grid, scheduled maintenance of facilities, pipeline vandalism and disputes around availability gas and payment for gas contracts between gas companies and power generating companies were responsible for the current power outage across the country.

The minister said this while briefing State House correspondents at the end of the weekly Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting chaired by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.

“The more reason we are facing the situation now is as a result of the shortage of gas and some of the generators have to go to maintenance.


“It is a scheduled maintenance and it is supposed to be scheduled outage, but we had not envisaged that we will have issues around vandalization of pipelines, which the NNPC has addressed as you can see evidently everywhere, aviation fuel, and petrol in the filling stations.

“It is a combination of many factors that compounded the problem we are having on the grid.

“We have recovered the grid now. The grid is back and we are trying to get more megawatts to push on the grid. We have set up small committees all geared towards getting more megawatts to put on the grid. Basically, the problem around gas.

“You need to have gas contract between generating companies and gas suppliers- some are form contracts, some are not. We are looking into this and have proffered some solutions in some few days to mature”, he said.

The minister also made clarification on the issue of quantity of generated electricity in the country, saying that the country has 8,000 megawatts capacity.

“We have capacity of 8,000 megawatts – the one on the grid, imbedded and captive. If you combine all of them, you will get these problems that we are encountering. We are on top of the challenge and very soon, we will come out of it.

“We have gotten approval now of N5billion from FEC to open up and expand – Lagos/Ogun where presently, they may not be enjoying quality electricity,” he said.