The national electricity grid suffered a system collapse on Wednesday, causing power blackout in states across the country.

DIPLOMATIC DIARY reports that the system failure, which is the sixth in the last 7 months, dipped the entire power supply nationwide to 40 mega watts.

The distribution load profile obtained by DIPLOMATIC DIARY showed that the national grid collapsed at around 12:23 pm on Wednesday.

Electricity from the generation companies was abysmally down to 40MW against 3,000MW generated previous day.

Allocations to the 10 electricity distribution companies were zero, except 40MW and 10MW to Abuja and Ibadan Discos respectively at 12:23 pm when the incident occurred.

The cause of the system collapse is yet to be ascertained but DIPLOMATIC DIARY gathered that the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) has, as usual, launched an investigation to unravel the cause.

On June 13, the National Grid collapsed for the fifth time this year resulting in nationwide power outage.

The Minister of Power, Engr. Abubakar Aliyu had last month attributed the low electricity supply across the country to gas supply challenges.

The Minister in a statement by his media aide, Malam Isa Sanusi explained that the “dip in electricity generation is as a result of the partial shutdown of the Oben gas plant to address the repair of critical gas processing equipment”.

The government noted that the “incident unfortunately occurred at a time when other power plants on other gas sources are undergoing planned maintenance and capacity testing.

“We wish to notify the public that Seplat Energy Plc has mobilized equipment, material and personnel to site with a view to expediting the restoration of normal gas supply to the affected power plants.”