Nigeria Faces First Major Blackout of 2025 as National Grid Collapses
Nigeria experienced its first significant blackout of 2025 today, Saturday, January 11, as the National Grid suffered a major collapse. This marks the first grid failure of the year, though it is the 13th such incident in just 13 months, highlighting ongoing challenges with the country’s power infrastructure.
According to the Nigerian System Operator’s official portal (niggrid.org), the collapse occurred precisely at 1:56 PM. The portal quickly followed up with an update, reassuring the public that “restoration has begun” and that power generation had resumed at 302MW by 2:40 PM, signaling efforts to stabilize the system.
EnergyTimePod, an online platform dedicated to explaining energy-related issues, shed some light on the technical aspects of the collapse. They noted that grid collapses generally fall into two categories: a partial collapse, where some areas remain with power, and a total collapse, where the entire country is affected by the outage. Today’s incident was a total collapse, leaving millions without electricity.
While the grid failure occurred at 1:56 PM, many Nigerians did not lose power until around 10 minutes later. EnergyTimePod clarified that such delays in power loss do not invalidate the report of the collapse, as the restoration process was underway even as generation was still recovering. At the time of the update, power generation had been restored to just over 1,000MW, a fraction of the national grid’s full capacity, which typically ranges between 4,500MW to 4,800MW.
