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BREAKING: Power Outage: We’ve Restored National Grid But Never Expected Some Of The Challenges – Minister

It said there were other challenges that led to the nationwide power outage apart from the drop in water level at dams, some of which it said were not envisaged.

The Nigerian Government has said the national power grid that collapsed earlier in the week has been restored.

It said there were other challenges that led to the nationwide power outage apart from the drop in water level at dams, some of which it said were not envisaged.

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The Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu, on Wednesday while addressing journalists at the State House in Abuja after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting, however, said the challenges were being addressed.

Nigeria has been experiencing a blackout since the collapse of the national power grid.

He identified the challenges that contributed to the power crisis to include the collapse of the grid, scheduled maintenance of facilities, vandalisation of pipelines, and issues regarding gas availability and contracts between gas companies and power generating companies.

He said, “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 vandalisation of pipelines, which the NNPC (Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation) 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.

The minister likened Nigeria’s power challenge to a war situation, but adding that the country has 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,” he added.

He added the Federal Executive Council has approved the provision of N5 billion to open up and expand Lagos/Ogun, to reinforce power supply to the region.

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Electronics