Fresh reports have emerged that there was a fire outbreak at the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) in Birnin Kebbi, Kebbi State in the early hours of Friday.
OsunDailyNG gathered that although the cause of the fire has not been confirmed, residents around the location of the burning TCN facility behind Mechanic Village in Birnin Kebbi said they only heard a loud bang followed by fire and thick smoke from a section of the electric installations at about 12: 32 am.
According to Daily Trust, the fire was still raging at about 1 a.m. as firefighters were not on the ground yet, and the fire had extended to other facilities around.
The development is coming barely 24 hours after a fire outbreak on the Kainji/Jebba 330 kilovolt (kV) line caused a national grid collapse on Thursday.
The Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, explained that the fire led to about 356.63MW generation loss.
Taking to micro-blogging platform X, formerly Twitter, the minister said, “At 00:35Hrs this morning, a Fire outbreak with an explosion sound was observed on Kainji/Jebba 330kV line 2 (Cct K2J) blue phase CVT & Blue phase line Isolator of Kainji/Jebba 330kV line1 was observed burning. This led to sharp drops in frequency from 50.29Hz to 49.67 Hz at 0:35:06Hrs with Jebba generation loss of 356.63MW,” he said.
“Kainji started dropping load from 451.45 MW at 00:35:07Hrs to zero. At 00:41Hrs frequency dropped further from 49.37 Hz to 48.41Hz then resulted in system collapse of the grid.”
