By Udeme Akpan

THE Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, has attributed Nigeria’s frequent national grid collapse to outdated infrastructure.

Nigeria’s power grid had collapsed for the seventh time in 2024, thus throwing the entire nation into darkness, Tuesday, this week.

However, Adelabu, who spoke at the unveiling of Hexing Livoltek, a new electricity meter manufacturing company in Lagos, said: “We keep talking about 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 said: “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. 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.”

Commenting on the decentralization of the nation’s power sector, he said: “This Electricity Act has decentralised power. It has enabled all the subnational governments, the state government and the local government, to be able to participate in the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity,” he said.

“We all rely on a single national grid today; if there is a disturbance of the national grid, it affects all 36 states. It shouldn’t be like that.

“This will enable us to start moving gradually towards having regional groups and possibly having state grids.

“And each of these grids will be removed and shielded from each other. So, if there’s a problem with a particular grid, only the state where it belongs will be affected, not the entire nation. So, this is one of the impacts this Electricity Act will have.”

On his part, Robert Liang, chief executive officer (CEO) of Hexing Group, said: “This is a proud moment for the Hexing Group as we open our branch in Nigeria. It’s more than just an office.”