The usual notice: I won’t proofread, edit, rewrite, polish or revise this. I just want to capture my thoughts as they exist in this moment. I’m sitting outside a cafe, with July’s rare sun beaming down, and I’m thinking about this problem and whether there’s a viable business hiding underneath. This might not feel polished.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about electricity in Nigeria. Not merely as an abstract policy problem, and not because I suddenly became an environmentalist, but because unreliable power eventually becomes impossible to ignore when you are trying to build a life and do serious work here.
I’ve probably spent about 1.5 of the last 5 years living in hotels. For the last 6 months, I’ve lived in upscale hotels, and moved around with the slightly absurd logistics of a digital nomad who has a dog, computers, chargers, two iPhones, two power banks, an Apple Watch, an AirPods Pro 3, and a headset of unknown brand. Every place has had its own version of the same bargain: there might be public power, but it cannot be trusted; there’s always a generator, but it’s noisy and occasionally unavailable (maintenance, empty tank, or simply switched off to save diesel). I spent two months at a hotel with inverters, but they must not have been of sufficient capacity. The power situation was not one isolated problem. It was a daily negotiation.
That experience is part of what led me to Project Solar.
The Nigerian power problem is larger than the grid
Nigeria’s electricity crisis is usually described through generation capacity, transmission failures, distribution companies, tariffs, gas supply, metering, and government subsidies. All of those matter. But from the perspective of an ordinary household or small business or digital nomad, the practical problem is simpler: electricity is not reliably available when it is needed.
The grid can exist and still fail to provide a dependable service. In the first quarter of 2025, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission reported average hourly grid generation of 4,770.59 MWh/h. By the third quarter, that had fallen to 4,179.15 MWh/h. These numbers describe the system, but they do not describe the frustration of a person whose freezer has gone warm, whose router has died during a work call, or whose business is burning fuel simply to remain open. They do not describe the frustration of spending ₦2.1M to board at a hotel for a month, and still needing to dash out at least thrice a week to find nearby restaurants or lounges or cafes to charge my laptop and get work done. NERC’s quarterly reports (opens in a new tab) show the volatility more clearly than most political speeches do.
The gap is filled privately. Homes, shops, offices, schools, hospitals, estates, and factories build their own parallel energy systems. Generators are not merely backup devices anymore; they are an integral part of Nigeria’s de facto electricity infrastructure. Solar home systems, batteries, inverters, and small private grids are increasingly doing the same work.
This is not because Nigerians are unusually enthusiastic about generators. It is because unreliable electricity imposes a direct cost on everything else. A business that cannot keep its lights, refrigeration, computers, pumps, fans, or internet equipment running is not viable for long; and a software engineer who works remotely, and cannot maintain roughly the same hours as his European colleagues, won’t keep his job.
Fuel makes the economics more painful. Petrol that cost roughly ₦180 per litre a in April 2023 has, at various points, been around ₦1,300 (plus or minus ₦70). Even when fuel prices move down, generator ownership still includes servicing, oil, repairs, noise, theft risk, and the constant mental burden of remembering to buy fuel before it runs out.
In 2025, I spent ₦500k-₦550k every single month fueling my generator. And I had inverters! (Although I never quite got around to installing solar panels.)
Solar is, therefore, not a luxury product in Nigeria, no matter what Twitter folk say. It is an attempt to buy back predictability.
Why Project Solar exists
Project Solar is my attempt to think through what a practical Nigerian energy company could look like. The ambition is not to sell imported hardware with a glossy brochure and then disappear when the first battery develops a fault. It is to build a dependable energy service around carefully selected equipment, proper installation, useful telemetry, maintenance, and financing that reflects the true financial realities of Nigerians in Nigeria.
That sounds obvious. It is not, believe me.
The solar market has plenty of companies selling systems. The difficult questions live before and after installation. How many Nigeria-living Nigerians can cough up ₦4M for a robust installation? How many are discouraged as much by cost as by stories of failed installations and dashed hopes? Was the system sized correctly? Is the customer using a fridge, pump, television, air conditioner, and deep freezer when the salesperson assumed only lights and fans? What happens when customers grow: buying a new air conditioner or a new coffee maker or a new washing machine? Is the battery being abused, particularly by poor ventilation and inadequate thermals? Is the inverter operating within safe limits? Is a panel shaded? Has a loose cable started heating? Is the customer paying for capacity that is never used, or expecting capacity that was never purchased?
Without answers to those questions, solar becomes a one-off transaction. The installer makes money when the equipment is delivered; the customer absorbs the risk. That model creates distrust, fuels stories, starts warranty disputes, and ultimately results in a market full of systems that technically exist but do not perform as promised. Which is the current reality of the solar procurement industry in Nigeria.
The opportunity is in reliability, not panels
The biggest opportunity is not necessarily selling more panels. Panels are increasingly commoditised. The more valuable product is reliable, measurable, affordable power. The more valuable product is power, as opposed to equipment.
That means treating a solar installation as a small piece of infrastructure. The system needs a load assessment, an honest explanation of its limits, protection equipment, sensible cable sizing, battery monitoring, and a maintenance plan. It also needs someone accountable when performance drops.
Telemetry is particularly important. If a system can report battery state, solar production, inverter faults, load consumption, temperature, and uptime, the system can autonomously detect problems before the customer discovers them at the worst possible moment (like 5 minutes before a work call or at the business opening time). And the customer inherits an ongoing relationship that’s based on trust (that’s, in turn, based on reliable, accessible, verifiable and trackable data). Data can also improve future system design. A proposed installation should be based on measured behaviour where possible, not guesswork and optimism. By the way: guesswork and optimism perfectly describe the current reality.
This is where the software side of Project Solar becomes interesting to me. I am a software engineer, so I naturally think in terms of observability, failure modes, automation, and feedback loops, all at scale. A solar company does not need to become a software company for its own sake. But it should use software to make physical infrastructure less opaque and less fragile.
The system should know what it promised to deliver, what it is actually delivering, and when those two things begin to diverge. And it should know these things immediately they occur, long before the customer notices.
Financing is as important as engineering
A technically excellent system is useless if the customer cannot afford the upfront cost. This is one of the reasons I keep returning to alternative commercial models.
One possibility is an instalment-purchase model, where the customer pays for the system over time while also paying a maintenance fee. Another is a pay-to-use subscription: the company owns and operates the equipment, while the customer pays for a defined amount of dependable power each month. Much like the way we treat Internet subscriptions. Or even prepaid “NEPA”.
The subscription model is attractive because it aligns incentives. The provider remains responsible for uptime, battery replacement, repairs, and system performance. The customer does not need to become an amateur electrical engineer or find a technician every time the inverter starts behaving strangely. The customer does not need to store distilled water. The customer does not even need to think about the installation. They pay, they get power.
But this model also creates serious risks. The provider has to price systems accurately, control theft and misuse, collect payments, and maintain enough capital to survive delayed payments and hardware failures. A ₦30,000 monthly plan may sound accessible, but it only works if the power allocation, customer segment, hardware cost, and maintenance assumptions are real. Unit economics cannot be rescued by enthusiasm. Unit economics is what I still haven’t figured out.
Estates, small businesses, clinics, schools, and workshops may be better initial customers than individual households. They have clearer economic value from uptime and may be easier to serve as clusters. A single installation serving several customers could also reduce acquisition, logistics, and maintenance costs.
The hard parts are not theoretical
Project Solar has several obvious challenges, and a few non-obvious ones. I’ve had a month to think about these.
First, hardware quality and supply chains are difficult. Equipment may be counterfeit, poorly documented, incompatible, or impossible to replace locally. Importation introduces exchange-rate risk, duties, shipping delays, and warranty complications. Local assembly may eventually help, but it does not magically solve quality control or component availability.
Second, installation quality is a business problem, not just a technical problem. A good inverter paired with poor cabling, inadequate protection, bad earthing, or an undersized distribution board is still a dangerous and disappointing system, not to mention a fire and health hazard. Technicians need training, standard procedures, supervision, and incentives to do the work properly.
Third, batteries change the financial model. Good batteries are often the most expensive and failure-sensitive part of the system. Their lifespan depends on chemistry, temperature, depth of discharge, charging behaviour, and maintenance. Any company promising a payback period without modelling battery replacement is probably hiding something.
Fourth, Nigerian customers have been disappointed before. They have bought systems that failed, paid technicians who vanished, and heard promises that turned out to be marketing language. Trust will have to be earned through transparent specifications, realistic expectations, monitoring, and visible after-sales support. A good example of this is my lounge-owner acquaintance who, in February, spent around ₦11M to install panels, batteries and inverters, and has been complaining (bitterly, I must add) ever since. His batteries never seem to charge from the panels, even on the most sunny of days, so he has to charge them with the “Lister” generator (in quotes because I don’t actually know what brand it is, but it’s one of those gigantic, white, noisy, smelly ones); his batteries are depleted after only a few hours, even with lights and non-essential equipment switched off; and he still spends nearly the same amount on diesel.
Finally, regulation and macroeconomics matter. Tariffs, import rules, exchange rates, fuel prices, financing costs, and electricity-market reforms can all change the shape of the opportunity. The World Bank’s DARES programme, which aims to expand distributed renewable access to more than 17 million Nigerians and replace hundreds of thousands of polluting generators, demonstrates that distributed energy is now a major part of the country’s official development agenda. The opportunity is real (opens in a new tab); that does not mean every solar business will be well run or profitable.
What I believe
I do not believe solar will fix Nigeria’s electricity problem by itself. The country still needs a functional grid, better transmission, viable distribution companies, gas infrastructure, industrial policy, metering, and serious public accountability. Distributed, affordable solar is not an excuse to stop demanding those things.
But waiting for the perfect national solution is also not a strategy. We’ve seen this. We know this. People and businesses need increasingly more power now; and, for the most part, lack the funds to buy this “luxury”. Distributed systems can provide resilience while the larger system is repaired, and they can eventually become part of a more decentralised energy network. Maybe even one that feeds into the regular grid.
My interest in Project Solar comes from that tension. I want to build something commercially viable, but I also want it to solve a problem that is painfully concrete. The goal is not to make customers feel virtuous for buying renewable energy. The goal is to help them keep working, preserve food, run equipment, sleep comfortably, and stop treating electricity as an unpredictable favour.
The opportunity is enormous. So is the potential to build another company that over-promises, installs mediocre equipment, and abandons customers after collecting payment. Or a company that only targets the rich.
Project Solar will only be worth pursuing if it can avoid becoming the latter. And if I can figure out the unit economics to make a subscription model work.
That is the challenge. It’s not putting solar panels on roofs, but building an energy service regular people can trust and afford.
There is a gap in the market, but is there a market in the gap?