Abuja blackout enters second day

MAY 26, 2015 : OKECHUKWU NNODIM, ABUJA

The blackout in virtually all parts of Abuja continued on Tuesday as most towns in the Federal Capital Territory had no electricity to power their businesses and residences.

Our correspondent reports that the situation was worsened by the breakdown of a transmission station in Apo, a satellite town in the FCT, although engineers were drafted to fix the station.

It was learnt that power allocation to the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company dropped to as low as 20 megawatts in the morning of Tuesday, whereas the AEDC was actually meant to receive 450MW on a good day.

It was also gathered that the allocation to the firm later increased to a little above 100MW, but still at that, most towns were completely left in darkness as of when this report was filed in on Tuesday night.

The PUNCH had reported that a total of 18 electricity generation plants out of the 23 across the country were not generating power as of Monday.

As a result, the country lost over 2,000 megawatts of electricity and the situation was caused by the vandalism of gas pipelines as well as the industrial action embarked upon by oil and gas workers in Nigeria.

The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission stated that in the last couple of months, electricity supply had been generally poor on account of increase in vandalism in the run up to the April 2015 elections.

http://www.punchng.com/news/abuja-blackout-enters-second-day/