The Lagos State Government has unveiled plans to raise electricity supply to about 3,500 megawatts as part of efforts to tackle persistent power outages across the state.
The target was disclosed on Thursday at the Lagos State High-Level Strategic Power Town Hall Meeting held at Lagos House, Marina, where the state government, Federal Government, regulators and industry operators reviewed the challenges confronting the electricity sector.
The stakeholders agreed that reliable electricity supply was critical to sustaining Lagos’ economic growth, attracting investment and improving the productivity of households and businesses.
Representing the Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, the ministry’s Director of Distribution Services, Baba Mustapha, said Lagos required more than 6,000MW but currently received only a fraction of that demand from the national grid.
He stressed that increasing electricity generation alone would not resolve the state’s power challenges without corresponding improvements in transmission and distribution infrastructure.
Mustapha identified gas supply, generation capacity, transmission constraints, distribution bottlenecks and metering as key areas requiring urgent attention.
He disclosed that Lagos had secured 400MW from private electricity producers, adding that the state should continue to explore gas-fired, embedded and renewable energy sources to expand supply.
Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, in his remarks, called for stronger coordination among stakeholders, alongside improvements in smart metering, data management, enforcement and revenue assurance.
He said coordinated action was necessary to restore consumer confidence, strengthen the electricity market and attract the investment required to expand infrastructure.
Sanwo-Olu also proposed a review meeting in five to six months to evaluate progress on the commitments reached at the town hall.
The Commissioner for Energy and Mineral Resources, Abiodun Ogunleye, said the state government was determined to end what he described as the “culture of blackout” in Lagos.
Ogunleye said Lagos currently received less than one gigawatt from the national grid, despite the Transmission Company of Nigeria having about 3.5GW of wheeling capacity.
He said the state’s immediate objective was to add about 2GW to the existing supply, bringing available electricity closer to 3.5GW and allowing more feeders to supply residential and industrial areas.
According to him, the government would develop specific action points and establish a baseline against which progress would be measured at the proposed six-month review.
On electricity tariffs and payment obligations, Ogunleye said improved supply must be accompanied by prompt payment of electricity bills.
He, however, stressed that the state opposed situations where consumers were charged for electricity they did not receive.
Also speaking, the Special Adviser to the President on Power and Chairman of the Presidential Task Force on Power Sector Reset and Restoration, Rilwan Babalola, said Nigeria’s electricity challenge could not be solved simply by adding more megawatts.
He said the country needed to move beyond managing shortages and develop a functional electricity market in which energy, contracts and payments move predictably across the value chain.
Babalola identified Lagos as a strategic testing ground for the proposed Clean Lagos Electricity Market, a model designed around demand aggregation, bilateral power contracts, open access, payment assurance and transparent settlement.
He said the proposed initial 500MW under the model must first demonstrate that electricity could be reliably generated, transmitted, delivered, metered, accounted for and paid for before the initiative was expanded.
Babalola also cautioned that the decentralisation of Nigeria’s electricity market should not result in fragmentation.
He called for clear coordination between federal and state regulators as well as effective integration with the interconnected national grid.
He said the broader objective of the Power Sector Reset was to shift the country from announcing generation figures to delivering electricity to consumers, from repeated government interventions to functioning markets, and from managing scarcity to building a sustainable electricity industry.
The meeting ended with a renewed emphasis on coordinated investment in generation, transmission, distribution and metering as Lagos seeks to close the gap between its huge electricity demand and actual supply.
