Why festive demands keep knocking national grid offline

    Muhammed Akanji | Insights | Jan 02, 2026    
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As Nigeria basked in the euphoria of the festive season, millions of homes and businesses were plunged not into light but into darkness, a familiar reminder of the country’s chronic power failures. Despite an installed grid capacity of over 13,000 megawatts (MW), actual power generation fell to about 3,000 MW, leaving households, hospitals, entertainment venues, and small businesses grappling with outages deep into Christmas. By Monday, December 29th, the grid collapsed, crashing to near 0 MW at 2:45 pm. It is needless to say that the latest incident means 2025 has seen at least 4 collapses, a fractional decrease compared to 2024, when the grid collapsed at least 12 times.

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