Shiroro power plant suffers system collapse

The already bad state of electricity supply across the country was made worse on Sunday following of a system collapse at the Shiroro Hydro-electric Power Plant in Niger State.

The Shiroro plant has a power generating capacity of 600 megawatts and began operation in 1990.

Our correspondent gathered that the system collapse at the plant happened at about 4.10pm on Sunday.

The system collapse resulted in massive load shedding as allocations to electricity distribution companies from the national grid was seriously reduced.

It was learnt that the power allocation to the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company was reduced from about 450MW to 15MW.

Officials of the AEDC stated that the company was left with only 15MW at about 5.05pm, a development that made it to supply electricity to only sensitive installations within the Central Business District of Abuja.

On Friday, the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Power, Ambassador Godknows Igali, had said power generation nationwide had dropped from about 4,800MW to 1,327MW, leading to the massive load shedding across the country.

In a bulk SMS sent by the AEDC to its customers in the Federal Capital Territory, Kogi, Nasarawa and Niger states, the firm explained that the cause of the huge drop in power supply in the region was due to the heavy drop in allocation to it from the national power grid.

The drop, it said, was “from about 450MW daily to less than 200MW in recent times. In fact, our allocation for Friday, May 22, 2015 was 145MW, while both Saturday and Sunday, May 23 and 24, 2015, was 115.6MW.

“And the situation has been worsened by the system collapse at Shiroro this evening, which brought our supply down to 15MW.”