Lights On: How AI Can Cut Nigeria’s Power Losses—Now

President Bola Tinubu has reaffirmed his administration’s strong commitment to power reform. Yet Nigeria still faces chronic outages, high losses and weak metering. AI offers a practical toolkit—forecasting demand, detecting theft, optimising smart-meter data, predicting outages. The reform journey has begun, but the losses endure.

In recent remarks, President Tinubu told a visiting Siemens Energy delegation that “there is no industrial growth or economic development without power. I believe that power is the most significant discovery of humanity in the last 1000 years.”  His statement reflects a clear priority: electricity supply must improve for Nigeria’s economic recovery and national well-being.

Yet the scale of the problem remains daunting. According to the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), in the fourth quarter of 2024 the aggregate technical, commercial and collection losses (ATC&C) remained high; billing efficiency was only 70.87 % in that quarter. Meanwhile, a review by Premium Times noted that “the year 2024 was a challenging one in Nigeria’s power sector, marked by recurring grid collapses and vandalism of electricity infrastructure”. These root causes—vandalised lines, aged infrastructure, high transmission and distribution losses—help explain why outages are frequent, and investment struggles to catch up.

The metering gap is another pervasive barrier. As reported by Vanguard Newspapers, “DisCos installed 70,888 new meters in August 2025, … the metering rate stood at 55.01 % in August, up slightly from 54.71 % in July.”  A rate of only 55 % means nearly half of customers are still billed on estimates, which undermines revenue collection, trust, and cost-reflective tariffs. These structural issues—asset decay, theft/unaccounted for energy, metering shortfalls—together form the major leak in the system.

This is where AI becomes a powerful enabler. First, demand forecasting models combining weather, economic activity and historical loads can allow the grid operator to schedule generation and transmission more tightly, reducing frequency deviations and system stress. Second, analytics on smart-meter and feeder data can identify abnormal consumption patterns—long spells of zero billed usage with high energy outflow, suspicious night-time spikes, bypass signatures—that flag theft or tampering. Third, once metering coverage improves, utility-scale meter-data management systems plus AI can segment customers, optimise tariffs, detect tamper alerts in realtime and transition away from estimated billing. Fourth, predictive maintenance models built on SCADA logs, breaker histories and environmental data can forecast feeder/transformer failures before they cause outages, allowing pre-emptive interventions.

The reform efforts are underway. Metering upgrades are gaining traction. The Electricity Act 2023 creates a more liberalised environment for investment and state-level markets. Partnerships with Siemens and mobile substations have been announced. However, the data show that despite these moves, outages persist and losses remain high. What is required now is not just hardware, but digital intelligence layered over operations—a “grid ops cell” that uses AI analytics as part of everyday decision-making. Nigeria can’t wait years for full asset replacement; smarter use of the existing system can yield gains now.

For the federal government, NERC and DisCos: publish feeder-level performance (ATC&C, metering, theft incident rate), establish joint AI operations cells, tie reform contracts (e.g., Siemens upgrades) to measurable loss-reduction targets. For investors and startups: develop solutions for theft detection, demand forecasting dashboards and predictive-maintenance analytics adapted to Nigeria’s data conditions. For consumer communities: insist on metering, report bypass/illegal connections, and support transparency. The grid is not broken beyond repair—but unless Nigeria acts now with digital-first tools, the losses and outages will continue.