The Transmission Company of Nigeria, TCN has said it had restored full
electricity supply to the national grid 18 hours after partial system
collapse.
The system collapse which occurred at exactly 11.15 pm on Friday, 8th
November 2019, was fully restored at 4:54 pm on the 9th of November,
2019.
According to the company, during the entire period however, the nation
did not experience full loss of electricity supply at the same time.
In a statement signed by the General Manager (Public Affairs), Ndidi
Mbah, the incident was caused by the tripping of the Lokoja –
Gwagwalada transmission lines 1&2 on power swing, due to causes yet to
be determined, and the tripping of the Onitsha – Alaoji transmission
line on overcurrent.
“These made the grid to operate in two parts, with the second part
which is the Western and Northern axis experiencing an outage. Efforts
immediately commenced to bring the Western and Northern axis back into
the circuit, and as soon as that was almost complete, meaning supply
was available most of the areas, the Eastern axis went out.”
The statement further stated that TCN went on to fully complete the
restoration of the Western/Northern axis, it equally began the
restoration of supply to the Eastern axis of the grid.
“When the grid was almost fully normalised, there was a fire incident
at the Onitsha Substation which necessitated the isolation of that
substation, to save lives and properties.
“At this stage, because the grid had not fully stabilized, the
shutting down of Onitsha substation, led to the tripping of some power
stations connected to the grid and supply loss in the North and
Western axis.
“Through the period of the power restoration process however, some
other power stations equally tripped while others continued to supply
the grid. This means that there was no one time that the entire grid
was down at the same time as TCN effectively utilised power from the
power generating stations not directly affected by the incident to
attempt to stabilize.
