WHAT ACTUALLY IS NATIONAL GRID COLLAPSE

WHAT ACTUALLY IS NATIONAL GRID COLLAPSE?

Prior to the restoration of the collapsed national grid, there have been a lot of questions about what the national grid actually is, this question became quite obvious considering the publicity that this collapse had over the previous collapses that had occurred during the past years, maybe because of the current challenges facing the country such as increased fuel rate (PMS, AGO, ATK and DPK), hard economic crises, and many other challenges facing the country.

Nigeria currently practice a very complex system of power supply where all the power generating stations are connected and linked together via a transmission system (330/132KV) and are transmitted to various injection sub stations across the country through the coordination of the National Control Centre (NCC) Osogbo for onward distribution to the customers by the eleven distribution companies in Nigeria.

Therefore, the national grid which is professionally called the power grid is the network of all transmission lines connecting the generating stations to the load centres which is designed to function and operate within certain stability limit of power, voltage, current and frequency.

For a customer to receive power supply at home, three major processes must have taken place; First, the power must have been generated from a generating station, transmitted to the transmission network and then distributed to the customer via a distribution network. These three process makes up the three major sections of the national grid network.

So when do we say the national grid is collapsed?

The national grid as stated above is designed to function and operate within certain voltage, current, frequency and power limits, so whenever these stability limits are out of the stability range, the grid operation will become unstable and invariably lead to a collapse of the system. This basically can occur when:

1. The generating stations are incapacitated to generate power and send to the grid, this can be as a result of lack of fuel to power the station (the fuel here could mean gas, diesel, water head, etc depending on the type of generating station)
2. When major transmission line or lines suddenly cut off along the line preventing the transmission of the generated power. This can be as a result of the ageing of the lines or obsolete nature of the towers and transmission support equipment
3. Vandalization of the transmission lines or major system equipment by either the restive youths or angry crowd.
4. Sudden breakdown of the transmission network due to ageing or obsolete generating, transmitting or distributing network equipment.
5. Operating failure as a result of overloading the lines beyond its rated capacity 
6. Cyber attack of the control softwares and electronic faults on the SCADA system
7. Major natural disaster such as earthquake, flood, tsunami and many other type of disaster.

Although, with reference to the collapse of Tuesday the 15th of March, 2022; the Nigeria Electricity Supply Industry (NESI), Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) and the current Minister of Power have all attributed the cause of this collapse to be:

1. Technical and Supply problems at the thermal station.
2. Low gas generation as a result of sabotage of gas pipeline.
3. A dip in hydroelectric generation due to seasonal pressure
4. Routine maintenance of some power plants that coincided with this technical and supply challenges.
5. Breakdown of three major power plants (Agip Okpai, Calabar and Afam 6 plants)

The Minister of Power, Engr. Abubakar Aliyu after the virtual FEC meeting of Wednesday, 16th March, 2022 said that all the contributing factors that caused the collapse have been put in place and the grid has been restored back.

Collapse of the national grid can either be Total or Partial depending on the nature of effect it has on the grid. When there is a nationwide blackout as witnessed yesterday 15th, March, 2022 it is called a total collapse this usually is caused by the breakdown of major generating stations but when only a section of the national grid is affected, it is called a partial grid collapse. In this type of collapse, some states or sections of the grid will be powered while the affected section will be in total black out.

History of Major Grid Collapse in Nigeria

Unfortunately, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) has no comprehensive data for national grid collapse since inception of the transmission of power from Osogbo, but according to Ripples Nigeria, the following are the breakdown of the national grid since 2010.

This makes it a total of 215 National Grid Collapses from 2010 to 20221. In 2022 so far, we have had three major national grid collapses, the first was on February 14th, 2022 during the popular valentine day celebration where there was power outage nationwide while the other two are these recent ones of 14th and 15th March, 2022, this now makes it a total of 218 national grid collapses from 2010 to 2022.

Recommendation on Prevention of Total Grid Collapse

Total grid collapse is not suppose to occur in a large country of ours that has been strategically divided into six geopolitical zones, with the passage of the new electricity bill 2022 into law, it is expected that this system collapse will be reduced to the barest minimum.

Some notable recommendations are:

1. The national grid should be decentralized and segmented into regions to prevent a complete system breakdown.
2. Weak transmission lines should be reinforced or replaced and obsolete equipment should be updated to modern ones.
3. Proper attention should be paid to the pipelines supplying gas to the various generating stations to prevent vandalization.
4. Most generating stations are working far below their installed capacity, this should be looked into to improve their efficiency.
5. Construction of more substations will go a long way to extend the reach of the power transmission and retain the reliability of the power supply.
6. Protection schemes for transmission – distribution interface is very key as this failure contributes to over 60% of system shutdown in the country.
7. Sky wires are very key in all transmission networks, most times it is being omitted during installation or after installation when it is vandalized it is usually not replaced. This is very bad as it is used to prevent the exposition of the lines to lightning strike.
8. Construction of real time digital control center with efficient Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) is very key to preventing system collapse as it will be easy to digitally monitor the grid in real time, trace and eventually rectify faults immediately.

Conclusion

National grid collapse especially when it is a total collapse does not put the country in a good light, these incidences can be averted, the three sectors of generating, transmitting and distributing have to be simultaneously improved to ensure the stability of the power system. If the generation is increased and no efficient transmission system to transmit the generated power, then it will lead to a system breakdown. Similarly if there is an efficient transmission system and no good distribution network, the power supplied will only be wasted.

Therefore, for a robust electric power system to be adequately achieved in the country, the three sectors have to be improved and made to work efficiently as a team.

Darlington Okoka

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