The federal government claims it is developing an independent supergrid for each of Nigeria’s 19 northern states.
Adebayo Adelabu, Minister of Power, made this known following a meeting with President Bola Tinubu in Abuja on Monday.
According to him, the President requested that repairs be expedited in order to restore power to Nigeria’s northern regions.
The north has been in a blackout for days due to vandalism of some transmission lines, prompting worries among stakeholders in the region and abroad.
Adelabu said, “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 a distributed power model whereby each of the northern states will have an embedded utility solar scale source. All the 20 states will be insulated and immune from each other.
“We have made progress in this as we have interested contractors and financials that are ready to install 100 megawatts each for each of the 20 northern states which scalable to 50 megawatts at first and then upgraded to 100 megawatts.
“We are working on establishing a super grid which is a backup of an optional grid. If the national grid has a problem, there will be an alternative grid through which power can be transmitted.
“The world has moved beyond having a central grid; grids must be regionalised – we must have state grids so that each of the regionalised grids can be insulated from each other so that a problem in a particular line will not affect the others. That is what we are working on. Until that is done, we believe that we will keep managing what we have and reduce the frequent occurrence of grid disturbance.”
