The national power grid collapsed for the second time in four days on Tuesday, raising fresh concerns over Nigeria’s electricity supply.
According to reports from officials monitoring the situation, power generation dropped drastically to just 39 megawatts at 11 a.m., down from 3,825 MW recorded at 10 a.m. Earlier in the morning, generation had peaked at 4,762 MW as of 6 a.m.
EkoDisCo, one of the electricity distribution companies, confirmed the incident in a statement, informing its customers of a system collapse that led to widespread power loss.
“Kindly be informed that there was a system collapse at 10:48 hrs, which has resulted in a loss of power supply across our network. We are currently working with our TCN partners as we hope for the speedy restoration of the grid. We will keep you updated as soon as power supply is restored. Kindly bear with us,” the statement read.
This marks the second national grid collapse in January 2026 and the third in less than a month, following previous outages on December 29, 2025, and Friday, January 23, 2026. At the time of Tuesday’s collapse, load allocation to distribution companies was 0.00 MW, indicating that no Disco was supplying electricity.
The Nigerian Independent System Operator (NISO) has yet to provide a full explanation for the latest outage but confirmed that it occurred around 12:40 p.m. after several 330kV transmission lines tripped simultaneously.
Regarding the previous Friday collapse, NISO said that combined incidents had caused a total disruption of the interconnected national grid. “The Nigerian Independent System Operator wishes to inform the public that at approximately 12:40 hours on Friday, 23 January 2026, the national grid experienced a system-wide disturbance, which resulted in a total outage across the interconnected network,” the agency stated.
The repeated grid failures have intensified concerns about the reliability of Nigeria’s power infrastructure and the impact on households and businesses nationwide.
