The Daunting Challenges of the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry

Abstract

The future state of the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI) is seemingly beginning to look promising amid the recent change in the country’s leadership and the increase in tariffs. Nevertheless, more still needs to be done to ensure the quality, availability and reliability of electricity supply to the citizenry; thus restoring the much-needed faith in the ongoing sector reforms as the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) set about implementing the Electric Power Sector Reform Act of 2005. With the wide array of energy sources available in the country such as biomass, large and small hydro, daily solar radiation of up to 7.5kWh/m², coal, lignite, wind, municipal solid waste (MSW), niobium, natural gas and crude oil, sufficient electricity generation using all these available sources of energy should be a given but this is not the case. Hence this paper carefully analyses each segment of the NESI and successfully identifies the root-causes of constant power outages in the country which has led to a high unreliability of supply, with a view to proffering workable solutions.

Keywords: Nigeria electricity supply industry, energy, power reliability