Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, has made a case for the decentralisation of the country’s power grid as a solution to the frequent grid collapses witnessed in the country.
The minister stated this when he unveiled Hexing Livoltek, an electricity meter manufacturing company in the Lekki area of Lagos State.
He said there is a need to have power grids in different regions or states to put an end to incessant grid collapses and also upgrade the country’s power infrastructure.
Adelabu said having multiple power grids in each region and state would ensure stability.
He noted that the decentralisation of the power sector would help the plan to build grids in each region, saying this was made possible by the Electricity Act signed by President Bola Tinubu 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.
The minister emphasised that the situation would be inevitable without sufficient investment in the sector.
“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 added.
