The Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, has emphasised the need for power grids in various regions or states to prevent grid collapses.
Adelabu made this statement while unveiling Hexing Livoltek, an electricity meter manufacturing company in the Lekki area of Lagos State.
Adelabu also acknowledged that grid collapses are almost unavoidable in Nigeria due to the country’s poor power infrastructure.
He stated that decentralising the power industry would aid in the plan to develop grids in each region, which was made feasible by President Bola Tinubu’s signing of the Electricity Act in 2023.
“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.
“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,” he stressed.
Speaking more specifically about the grid collapse, he stated that it would be unavoidable if the industry did not receive adequate investment.
“We keep talking about grid collapse. 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 declared.
Adelabu maintained that there had been no grid collapses in the previous four months until Monday.
“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. So, what we work on now is how to improve our response time, to bring it up each time it collapses.
“There are transformers that are 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,” he enunciated.
Adelabu praised the corporation for investing so heavily in Nigeria at a time when others were pulling out.
He described the event as an important milestone in the sector’s journey towards a more efficient and equitable electrical sector.
The minister noted that the opening of the meter factory was a significant milestone in Nigeria’s continued efforts to emphasise local content, foster job development, and minimise dependency on imports.
Robert Liang, CEO of Hexing Group, praised the company’s expansion into Nigeria as a significant step towards advancing clean energy. Liang emphasised Hexing’s three decades of leadership in the country.
