A fresh nationwide power outage occurred on Sunday evening as the national electricity grid crashed to zero.
In Abuja and other cities across the country, electricity bulbs fluctuated before they went off.
Recall that Nigeria since April has recorded four system collapse with the last happening on April 8, 2022.
It was gathered that Sunday’s nationwide outage first occurred at about 6pm as generation from various power plants began to drop drastically.
The grid collapse was said to have occurred at exactly 18:49 hours on Sunday.
Up till around 6:00pm on Sunday, shortly before the collapse, power generation from 13 GenCos to the national grid was 1,353.80 megawatts (MW).
Although there are about 24 active Gencos on the grid system, from the 13 GenCos on Sunday evening, only Delta (Ughelli) GenCo did up to 371MW; Rivers IPP had 156MW, Omotosho did 130MW, Olorunsogo did 128MW.
The remaining nine GenCos, it was gathered, did not generate up to 100MW.
It was further learnt that the baseload GenCos which include the three hydropower plants that guarantee stable electricity, were affected by the grid collapse.
About 45 minutes before the national grid collapsed, while Kainji had 51MW, Jebba had 88MW but Shiroro was down.
Reports from the Nigeria System Operations, a section of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) and grid manager, indicate that there has been a lull in power generation.
The highest generation on Saturday was 3,685MW, also being the highest electricity generated in Nigeria for a week (since Sunday 5th June).
As at the time of filing this report, TCN was yet to officially issue a report on the remote and immediate cause of the grid collapse.
It was, however, gathered that the restoration process had intensified and power restored to Abuja and some states, first.