Shortage Of Gas, Maintenance Of Generators Responsible For National Blackout – FG

The federal government has said multiple factors were responsible for the collapse of the national grid twice in less than 48 hours.

The Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu, stated this while speaking to State House Correspondents after the weekly virtual Federal Executive Council meeting presided over by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.

He said apart from the collapse of the grid, other issues, including scheduled maintenance of facilities, vandalisation of pipelines, disputes around availability of gas and payment for gas contracts between gas companies and power generating companies, all conspired leading to the current power crisis.

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 has addressed as you can see evidence everywhere, aviation fuel, and petrol in the filling stations,” he explained.

He pointed out that, “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.

On the quantity of generated electricity in the country, he said, “We have capacity of 8,000 megawatts – the one on the grid, embedded 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”.