FG Approves New Electricity Grid To Stop Collapses

The Federal Government has approved plans to develop new eastern and western electricity grids as part of efforts to reduce the frequent collapse of Nigeria’s national power grid.

Naija News reports that the Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, disclosed this during an energy conference in Lagos.

Tegbe said the government was preparing to begin the procurement process for the projects, adding that Nigerians could start seeing the benefits within the next two to three years.

He explained that the planned grid expansion was part of broader efforts to improve electricity transmission and ensure a more reliable power supply across the country.

According to the minister, the government has divided Nigeria into three energy zones to help identify areas that require urgent attention and determine how available resources should be distributed.

“We have clustered Nigeria into three energy zones. The first one is the one that demands 50 per cent. If you fix Lagos and you fix the Abuja corridors, you’ve solved more than half of the problem of Nigeria. Because you can’t do that alone based on operational efficiency, you also have to build out your grid.

“The President has approved that we commence the process of building out the grid: East and Western grid. We’re going through the procurement process, but it’s something you’ll see the benefits in two to three years,” the Minister said.

“We have started a technical audit across the entire country to say where do we have issues, and what issues specifically do we have. I don’t want to fix transformer issues where I have conductor and relay problems. I don’t want to fix insulators where the challenges I actually have are towers. So, we will finish that technical audit in the next couple of weeks. When we finish it, we then target our prioritised areas,” he said.

“This government has inherited a problem of 50 years. Before I became the Minister of Power, honestly, I used to think that everybody in the power sector just didn’t know their left from right. But the reality is, some of the towers have gone down with some of the transmission lines there.

“When I went to the site, I saw some of them carrying the logo of ECN. Many people in this room might not know what ECN is. ECN predated NEPA. So, some of these things were built 50 years ago. That is the reality,” he stated.