By Festus Fifen.

The Nigeria Minister of power Adebayo Adelabu says infrastructures supporting the current National Power Grid are obsolete as most of the components are well over 50 years indicating that they need to be replaced with a more functional system

Adelabu stated this while responding to questions from State House Corespondents at the Aso Rock Presidential Villa Abuja after a private meeting with President Bola Tinubu.

According to the Minister, “We have a national grid that is more than 50 years old. We have a national grid whose transmission lines are weak, the towers are falling and the substations, the transformers are old. In fact, the transformer that actually exploded in jeba was 47 years old. We’ve been trying to revamp this to change them, but they cannot all be changed overnight.

So it’s like you’re having a rickety car. You’ll be expecting a breakdown once in a while. What we continue to do is continue to manage the grid to prevent frequent occurrence of the grid disturbance, until we’re able to completely overhaul the grid itself, then we’ll have a reliable grid.

Speaking on why he visited Mr President , Adelabu said ” I came here to brief Mr. President, among various other things, including the issue of the disturbance in electric supply to the northern part of Nigeria, about 17 states.

” We discussed the root cause of this, which was basically due to vandalization of the transmission lines of the Shiroro Kaduna line, which is the major line that supplies electricity to the north, The Transmission Company of Nigeria, TCN, already set out to fix this line. What they have asked for, which has been provided to them now is the security cover of the National Security Advisor through the chief of Army staff and Chief of Air Staff to enable them to restore the damaged line. And we are optimistic that very soon this will be fully restored.

On the immediate steps the government is taking to solve the current power outage in Northern Nigeria, Adelabu said, ” We have also explored the alternative line of providing light to the north through the Ikot Ekpene substation supplied from the Calabar plant, but the line got caught along the line, and we are also trying to fix that. And if you remember that at the last FEC one of the approvals for the ministry of power was actually the upgrade of the Shiroro Kaduna transmission line, which is the major line that supplies electricity to the northern part of the country.

” We already have approval for this. It is one of the oldest transmission lines that we have in Nigeria, and we believe that it requires an upgrade. And through the magnanimity of Mr president and the Federal Executive Council, we got an approval to fix the line on a permanent basis. Once this is done, I believe that power to the North will be more stable than we’re experiencing right now.

” When we have this the power supply to the North will be reliable because of the advantage of the sun that they have, where solar will be highly effective. The lowest number of hours that a state in the north enjoys in terms of sunshine is 10 hours. And once you have this we believe that the pressure on the national grid from the northern part of Nigeria will be lower, and our people, will be able to enjoy better suppliers.

” let me also state that the world is moving, this is the 21st century, and we believe that the most effective way of supplying uninterrupted, functional, stable and reliable electricity to the northern part of Nigeria is through our distributed power model, whereby each of the northern states will have an embedded utility, solar scale, solar source.

” All the 20 states will be insulated and immune from each other, actually we made progress in this as we have interested contractors and financiers that are ready to install 100 megawatt each for each of the 20 northern states, which is scalable to 50 megawatts at first, then upgraded to 100 megawatt.

Speaking further, Adelabu said the Federal Government is working on establishing what is called a super grid, which is a backup of failover, optional grid. Noting that if the national grid has a problem, there will be an alternative route through which power can be transmitted.

Hr also added that ” the fact is that the world has moved beyond having a centralized grid. Grid must be regionalized. We must have state grids so that each of the grids will be insulated from each other so that a problem in a particular line will not affect others. That is what we are working on. Until that is done, we believe that we’ll keep managing what we have and reduce the frequent occurrence of the great disturbance.