A presidential candidate’s idea to install solar panels on every roof in Nigeria may seem impressive; however, the figures and available roof space suggest it is not feasible.
The electricity crisis in Nigeria needs resolving since, although the installed capacity of the grid is 13,625MW, the average available capacity is about 4,384MW, roughly 32% of the total.
In August 2026, generation dropped as low as 1,132MW due to partial grid collapses. The World Bank estimates that about 90 million Nigerians have no reliable access to electricity.
In light of this, the idea of making an ambitious commitment regarding solar power is not unrealistic.
Adewole Adebayo, the presidential candidate from the Social Democratic Party, pledged during a September interview on Arise Television’s Prime Time that he would have solar power of between 11 and 15 kilowatts on “every Nigerian roof” within eleven months of taking office should he be elected in 2027.
The plan for this presidential campaign promise includes:
- domestic solar-panel factories built with partners in China, Turkey and India,
- a national training programme for installers and maintenance of the systems,
- decentralised solar clusters capable of generating up to 32,000MW, and
- the national grid held in reserve as backup.
Although Fact Check Africa said the claim accurately reflects the intention, it also said that the evidence examined does not show that the programme is achievable in terms of technique, finance, or logistics within the time frame given.
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What does 11 to 15kW mean?
The pledge does not indicate whether 11-15kW refers to the capacity of the PV modules, the inverter, or the capacity of the entire system including the batteries. Having this distinction on hand has a considerable effect on the engineering, the cost and the delivery timeline.
Also, it does not specify how many households “every roof” conveys. Since Nigeria has almost 50 million households (49.5 million according to 2025 figures), mutiplying that number by even a fairly small system size, the demands for equipment, logistics and financing go from large to unprecedented.
Roof space is the first constraint
A residential system with a power output between 11 and 15kW generally requires unshaded roof space of 55 to 80 square metres, depending on the efficiency of the panels. However, many urban Nigerian homes, including compact bungalows, face-to-face tenements and apartment blocks, have neither that much nor any usable roof space.
Although rural rooftops have more space available to them, they are hindered by the fact that installers and the service infrastructure, which the plan suggests building from scratch, are located at far distances.
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Daylight power is not reliable power
Solar panels only produce electricity during the day when the sun is shining. It is the batteries that enable the electricity generated during the day to be used for lighting, television and refrigeration at night, when Nigerian homes need it most.
Adebayo’s plan neither includes nor details battery provision on a large scale, and as a result the pledge may end up providing only daytime capacity rather than the continuous power that Nigerians really need.
Manufacturing capacity is real but young
Nigeria’s domestic solar manufacturing is actually already expanding. According to the Rural Electrification Agency, installed manufacturing capacity has increased by 150% over two years and is now at 300MW. This is supported by about $425 million set aside for eight new facilities and an additional 3.7GW that is still in the pipeline.
LPV Technologies’ Lagos plant, which opened in January 2025 with a rated capacity of 200MW, currently produces about 100MW. However, the factory still imports the majority of its raw materials.
Building factories, establishing supply chains and creating the skilled workforce needed to domestically manufacture and install tens of gigawatts of panels is a project that takes several years.
The unaccounted-for bill
The cost of fitting just one kilowatt’s worth of panels—enough to power a fridge, a fan and a number of small appliances during the day—on 50 million roofs at about $500 per kilowatt would be roughly $25 billion for the panels, before taking into account the inverters, batteries, installation or wiring.
If the panels’ output is scaled up to the 11 to 15kW per roof that was promised, the cost of the panels rises to between $275 billion and $375 billion.
For comparison, two natural gas power stations with a capacity of 2,500MW—enough to add 5,000MW of dispatchable, round-the-clock capacity to the national grid—cost about $6 billion.
Funding a rooftop programme at this scale within a year would mean raising several multiples of what it costs to build gas plants that run day and night.
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Organic growth already shows the way
This does not mean that rooftop solar is the wrong solution for Nigeria; on the contrary. In 2025, off-grid and mini-grid solar systems added roughly 803MW of new capacity. This growth is a year-on-year increase of 141%, making Nigeria the second-largest solar growth market in Africa.
96 per cent of that growth came from private households, businesses and mini-grid operators replacing diesel generators and the unreliable grid supply, without any government requirement forcing them to do so.
That organic growth, paired with a genuine if young domestic manufacturing base, is the foundation a realistic policy should build on rather than bypass.
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A version worth keeping beyond campaign promises
Adebayo’s instincts are mostly correct because Nigeria’s electrical grid is failing, decentralised generation is the quickest way to provide power for the 90 million Nigerians who currently have no reliable supply, and local manufacturing helps reduce the country’s dependence on imports.
The mistake lies in how it is packaged—with a single overall kilowatt figure, a nationwide rollout to be achieved within eleven months, and a manufacturing base which is assumed to already exist rather than one that is actually built up.
A viable form of the pledge should adjust the system sizes to match the actual power requirements of individual households—ranging from one to three kilowatts with battery storage for the majority of homes and should use a phased delivery over five to ten years, giving priority to the 90 million who are currently unserved.
Instead of setting up entirely new state-owned factories, it would rely on existing programmes such as the Rural Electrification Agency’s Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-Up initiative (DARES) and on domestic manufacturers such as LPV Technologies.
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Financing would combine development finance institutions, results-based grants and diesel-displacement expenditure, which is currently happening in the private market, rather than coming from a single item in the government budget.
On the whole, the kind of decentralised solar clusters that Adebayo suggests is still a good approach. What Nigeria needs from any candidate who claims to remedy the problems in its power sector is a version of that idea that includes costs and is presented in stages, not a larger figure with a shorter time frame.ESI
