By Chidi Nwafor
It was a dry-season afternoon in Abuja, the kind where the heat sits on the city like a lid and every air conditioner in every office is running at full capacity. I was at my desk at De-Lazuli Consult, mid-sentence in a transaction review, when the lights went out. Not a flicker. A full collapse. The generator kicked in seventeen seconds later. I kept writing. Nobody called to ask what happened.
That last detail is the one worth sitting with. We have normalised it.
Nigeria’s national grid collapsed at least eight times in 2024, by some accounts, closer to twelve, cutting power to Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and every major economic corridor in between. Hospitals ran on diesel. Cold chains failed. Small businesses absorbed losses they could not invoice to anyone. By the following morning, the story had moved on. In Nigeria, grid collapse is not news. It is the weather.
But here is what the global energy conversation keeps misclassifying: these failures are not an African anomaly. They are a concentrated, high-frequency signal of a structural problem building, more slowly and more quietly, inside every major electricity system on the planet. When California’s grid strains under a heat dome, it earns urgent policy attention. When Nigeria’s grid collapses for the eleventh time in a year, it is filed under developing-world infrastructure challenges, and the lesson is lost. I want to recover from that lesson.
The Middle Nobody Talks About: Having spent years working on energy transactions, grid projects, and DFI engagement across Africa, I have come to believe that the energy transition debate has a serious blind spot. We have built a consensus around the top of the supply chain, the generation capacity, installed renewables, emission targets, while consistently underinvesting in what I call the missing middle: the transmission infrastructure, grid management systems, storage capacity, project preparation pipelines, and transaction structures that determine whether generation ever becomes reliable power delivery.
The global narrative has become, in important ways, a generation story. The cost of utility-scale solar has fallen more than 90 percent over the past decade. Wind is cost-competitive with gas in most markets. These are real achievements. What they have not produced is commensurate investment in the systems that carry, manage, and store what generation creates.
The IEA estimates that grid investment globally needs to reach approximately $600 billion annually by 2030, that is roughly double current levels, to keep pace with the energy transition. Grid and storage bottlenecks, not generation shortfalls, are increasingly the binding constraint. This is not a developing-market observation. In the United States, the interconnection queue for new generation projects held over 2,600 gigawatts of capacity in 2023, most of it waiting for transmission access that does not yet exist. In Germany, a decade of planning has not produced the north-to-south transmission capacity needed to move renewable power to industrial demand. In the United Kingdom, regulators estimate the country must build more grid infrastructure in the next decade than it has built in the past century. The missing middle is their problem too. The difference is they have financial cushions to absorb the cost of delay. Most of the world does not.
Why Nigeria Makes It Visible: Nigeria has approximately 13,000 megawatts of installed generation capacity. The grid typically delivers between 3,500 and 5,000 megawatts of actual power at any given time, against estimated demand exceeding 30,000 megawatts. That gap is not primarily a generation gap. It is a transmission and distribution gap, aging infrastructure that cannot carry available power to where it is needed, commercial losses that make utilities financially unviable, and a regulatory structure that has suppressed the tariff reforms required to attract private capital.
The result is a system operating permanently at its stability limits. When a single node fails, cascading effects ripple across the network with nothing in reserve to absorb them. Collapse is not a malfunction. It is the predictable output of a system designed without redundancy.
This is why Sub-Saharan Africa has become the world’s largest market for off-grid solar technology, not because distributed generation is the preferred outcome, but because when the grid cannot be trusted, businesses and households’ route around it. Nigeria’s commercial and industrial sector spends an estimated $14 to $17 billion annually on self-generated power from diesel and petrol generators. That capital, properly structured, could be financing the grid investments that would make the generators unnecessary.
Developers Present Projects. Financiers Need Platforms.
This is the part of the argument I cannot write from the outside because it requires having sat in both rooms.
On one side: a developer with a 5-megawatt solar asset. Real land. A credible engineering study. A term sheet from a local bank at rates that make the project unviable. The developer goes to an AfDB or IFC credit committee and presents the project.
On the other side: a credit committee with a $500 million energy mandate, a team of three transaction officers, and a minimum ticket size that exists because the cost of processing a $5 million transaction is not materially different from the cost of processing a $50 million one. The committee cannot deploy its mandate on single small assets. The pipeline does not flow.
This mismatch which I have observed repeatedly across Lagos, Nairobi, and Accra is not a failure of ambition on either side. It is a structural incompatibility between the unit of supply (individual projects, often small, often inadequately prepared) and the unit of demand (aggregated, institutionally structured, risk-assessed capital).
Bridging it requires project aggregation: assembling individual assets into portfolios with consistent legal structures, shared due-diligence documentation, standardised power purchase agreement templates, and combined scale that makes DFI engagement viable. This is substantial work requiring legal, financial, and technical capacity that most early-stage African developers do not have and cannot afford to acquire alone.
The consequence is self-reinforcing. Development finance institutions announce ambitious energy mandates, the African Development Bank, the IFC, and the African Energy Bank, which launched in Abuja in June 2026 capitalised at $5 billion, all carry significant commitments. But deployment is structurally constrained by the absence of a prepared, bankable pipeline. Institutions cannot deploy capital that has nowhere viable to go. Developers cannot build pipelines without the capital to prepare them. The gap between commitment and disbursement becomes a measure not of institutional failure, but of structural absence.
The next decade will not be won by those who build the most projects, but by those who can aggregate, structure, and finance them at scale.
The Warning in the Darkness: The structural story of Nigeria’s grid is not about what goes dark. It is about what happens when the world fails, systematically and over decades, to invest in the infrastructure that connects energy supply to energy access. Climate goals require grids capable of carrying clean power at scale. Economic development requires reliable electricity. Digital inclusion requires stable power. None of these outcomes are achievable by generation investment alone.
Nigeria’s grid collapses are not a peripheral story the rest of the world can observe from a safe analytical distance. They are a preview, a compressed, high-frequency, stripped of the financial cushions that soften equivalent failures elsewhere, of what happens when the missing middle is treated as someone else’s problem for long enough.
The energy transition is not primarily constrained by technology. Generation has largely delivered what was asked of it. The transition is constrained by the infrastructure, financing mechanisms, institutional capacity, and transaction structures that connect generation to reliable power delivery. Building those things, at the speed and scale required, is the defining implementation challenge of the next decade.
The lights will come back on in Abuja. They always do. The question is whether the world is ready to treat the reason they went out as the strategic priority it actually is.
Chidi Nwafor, Founder and Lead Strategist at De-Lazuli Consult, writes from Lagos and Abuja and can be reached at chidi.nwafor@de-lazuliconsult.com, +2348094561290.
