Fact-Check: Did Nigeria’s Electricity Grid Collapse For The 6th In 2022?
Nigeria has battled with deteriorating power supply for decades, often resulting in power outage and grid collapse. Nexus News recalls that the country’s national grid has collapsed at least five times in 2022 alone.
In a paper, dated 4th June, 2022, Premium Times published that a shutdown has caused power outage across the country for days.
It further noted that, in a 6th national grid collapse this year, the federal government said the latest dip in electricity generation in the country was caused by a partial shutdown of a gas plant.
However, the Transmission Company Of Nigeria TCN in a circular released on 7th June, 2022, refuted the aforementioned report by Premium Times, labelling it as ‘false’ and ‘misleading’.
“We clearly state that there was no sixth grid collapse this year as alleged by Premium Times, neither has there been any recently, even though power generation from both the Thermal and Hydro Stations have been very low.” The statement partly read.
“Also, the current dip in electricity generation was caused by the Partial Shutdown of Oben gas plant to address some Process Safety Critical Equipment failure, which led to a total loss of about 565.5MW of generation from seven thermal stations. This does not amount to grid collapse as reported by Premium Times.” it added.
TCN further demanded that the report be withdrawn by Premium Times and also encouraged confirmation of ‘critical information’ before publication in the future.
In reaction to this, Premium Times apologised for the mistake as contained in the report. The apology read:
“Editor’s Note: A glitch in our editing process caused a mis attribution of the cause of the recent power outage to grid collapse. This has been corrected and we apologise for the error.”
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