Five reasons Nigeria’s solar boom is just getting started

Nigeria’s power grid collapsed twice in the first two months of 2026 alone. It has failed nearly 140 times over the past decade.

So, when the lights go out in Lagos, Abuja or Port Harcourt, fewer Nigerians are reaching for a diesel generator. They’re reaching for a solar panel instead.

The country now leads sub-Saharan Africa in small-scale solar additions, and forecasters say the boom is nowhere near its ceiling. Bloomberg NEF projects Nigeria’s cumulative solar capacity — currently around 6 gigawatts, could hit 87 gigawatts by 2035.

Here are five reasons analysts think that trajectory holds.

The grid keeps failing, and the market has stopped waiting for it

Nigeria’s installed generation capacity tops 12,000 megawatts, but actual output regularly struggles to clear 5,000. Transmission bottlenecks and distribution losses shrink that further before it reaches homes.

“Every collapse is a sales pitch we didn’t have to write,” said one Lagos-based solar installer, describing how blackouts convert skeptical customers into buyers within days. With diesel prices volatile and generator maintenance costly, solar has shifted from a backup option to, for many households and businesses, the primary power source.

It’s happening almost entirely off-grid — which means it’s happening fast

Roughly 96 percent of Nigeria’s solar capacity sits outside the national grid: rooftop arrays, solar home systems, and mini-grids serving villages and industrial estates the grid has never reached. That matters because off-grid projects don’t need government transmission upgrades, land acquisition fights, or utility sign-off, just a rooftop and financing.

Nigeria added 3.1 gigawatts of…