Electricity supply disrupted again as national grid collapses twice in four days
Nigeria’s electricity supply suffered another major setback on Tuesday as the national power grid collapsed for the second time in four days, cutting off electricity nationwide.
Data obtained from power sector monitoring showed that load allocation to all electricity distribution companies dropped to 0.00 megawatts, meaning no power was supplied to consumers at the height of the incident.
Millions left without power amid repeated outages
The collapse occurred after electricity generation, which had climbed steadily earlier in the day, suddenly crashed.
Generation had peaked at 4,762MW around 6 a.m., before falling to 3,825MW by 10 a.m. and plummeting to just 39MW at about 11 a.m.
Confirming the outage, Eko Electricity Distribution Company informed customers that the disruption followed a system failure on the national grid.
“Kindly be informed that there was a system collapse at 10:48 hrs, which has resulted to a loss of power supply across our network. We are currently working with our TCN partners as we hope for the speedy restoration of the grid. We will keep you updated as soon as power supply is restored. Kindly bear with us,” the Disco stated.
Meanwhile, the Nigerian Independent System Operator confirmed that the outage occurred around 12:40 p.m., attributing it to the simultaneous tripping of several 330kV transmission lines.
However, the agency is yet to provide details on what triggered the latest collapse.
Authorities scramble to restore electricity supply
The incident marks the second grid failure in January 2026 and the third in less than one month, following earlier collapses on December 29, 2025, and January 23, 2026.
Reacting to Friday’s incident, NISO had said, “The Nigerian Independent System Operator wishes to inform the public that at approximately 12:40 hours on Friday, 23 January 2026, the national grid experienced a system-wide disturbance, which resulted in a total outage across the interconnected network.”
The recurring failures continue to raise concerns over the stability and resilience of Nigeria’s power infrastructure.
