Nigeria ranks top among countries with highest power outages – IEA

Nigeria ranked top among the countries with significant power shortages in 2023, alongside emerging economies like Pakistan and Kenya, a new report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) has shown.

According to the 2024 IEA report, insufficient power capacity, fuel supply challenges, and grid-related technical issues continued to cause significant power shortages in many regions across the globe.

“The majority of these outages were observed in emerging economies such as Pakistan, Kenya, and Nigeria, which are particularly affected by insufficient electricity supply, infrastructure problems, and strained grids in the face of rising power demand,” the report said.

“In 2022, 73 percent of Nigeria’s population had access to electricity, an increase of more than 70 million people during the past decade. Although the country has a total installed capacity of about 13 GW, the average available capacity remained around 4.5 GW in 2023 due to a combination of factors such as deteriorating units, poor maintenance, and liquidity constraints,” it added.

BusinessDay findings showed Africa’s biggest economy grappled with recurrent power failures, totaling more than 46 grid collapses between 2017 and 2023.

The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) said Nigeria’s grid continues to face issues due to aged infrastructure and vandalism.

According to the IEA, unreliable power supply due to limited grid infrastructure, underinvestment, and ineffective regulatory frameworks have resulted in an estimated 40 percent of all the electricity consumed in the country being produced from backup generators.

In June 2023, Nigeria adopted a new Electricity Act 2023, which aims to provide a comprehensive legal and institutional framework for a privatised contract and rule-based competitive electricity market, to attract private sector investments across the power sector.

“While the act strengthens the role of regulatory bodies, as it introduces consumer protection measures and provides for a transparent tariff-setting process, it also opens up the possibility of multiple licensing regimes by enabling regulation at the state level,” IEA report said.

It added, “Although regulation at the federal level remains the rule where no state regulation is specified, careful co-ordination and streamlining of regulatory approaches across states would be required to minimise the uncertainty of different regimes.”

IEA identified another major blackout in 2023 which occurred on 23 January in Pakistan, resulting from overloaded transmission lines, causing a voltage drop. “Simultaneously, the northern region grappled with reduced power generation due to plant operating issues”.

“These combined factors led to an uncontrollable power swing that resulted in a nationwide blackout affecting 220 million people for over 12 hours. Notably, this marked the second occurrence within a year, with a prior incident on October 13, 2022, causing a complete blackout in the south and a partial blackout in the north, resulting in a loss of over 8,000 MW,” IEA said.

Also, Kenya experienced a major power outage, impacting over 50 million people, with power being restored nearly 24 hours later on August 25, 2023. According to the IEA, the cause of this outage remains uncertain.

“This incident marked Kenya’s fifth nationwide blackout in the past four years and is noted as one of the longest on record. Kenyans saw another nationwide outage in early December. The event lasted less than a day but it was the third major blackout in four months,” IEA added.

In response to the situation, the national power company, Kenya Power, scheduled power interruptions throughout December as a load-shedding strategy while allowing for maintenance and modernisation of the infrastructure.

Other countries that experienced blackouts last year on the back of insufficient power capacity, fuel supply challenges, grid-related technical issues, and extreme weather events in the period were Egypt, Brazil, Canada, the US, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka, India, Madagascar, Bangladesh and Yemen.