Nigeria’s national grid had 5,403.3 megawatts available for distribution as of 8.07pm on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, according to the daily load allocation schedule from the National Control Centre in Osogbo. Of that, 4,379.07MW went to the country’s 11 distribution companies, with the balance set aside for other approved uses.
The schedule listed 1,024.18MW as exempted load, which brings the total available generation to 5,403.25MW and effectively matches the 5,403.3MW headline figure. The exempted portion is power that never reaches ordinary consumers through the DisCos, and the split is where the story really sits.
Of the exempted load, the NCC document put 108.07MW towards power stations and auxiliary consumption, and 367.87MW towards transmission losses and substation services. The rest covers bilateral arrangements and dedicated industrial connections, among them 99MW for Mainstream industrial customers, 69.75MW for AFPL, 65.70MW for PARAS, 55MW for Penstock, 50MW each for Delta and Odukpani NIPP, and 50MW for Niger.
Abuja DisCo took the largest slice of the allocation to distribution companies at 700MW, followed by Ikeja on 581MW and Ibadan on 550MW, according to the schedule. Benin received 531MW, Eko 519MW and Enugu 512MW.
Port Harcourt was allocated 466MW, while the northern franchises trailed well behind. Kano got 161MW, Kaduna 155MW and Jos 134MW, with Yola receiving the smallest share at 70MW.
That spread is worth pausing on. The three lowest allocations, all in the North, add up to 450MW, less than two thirds of what Abuja alone received, a pattern that tracks years of weaker demand, higher losses and infrastructure gaps in those franchises rather than any single day’s decision.
For all the detail in the schedule, one number frames everything else. A single day’s reading of about 5.4GW is a snapshot, not a record, and it sits some distance below the all time peak the Transmission Company of Nigeria has cited.
TCN has said the highest power ever generated and delivered to the grid remains 5,801.84MW, recorded on 4 March 2025, alongside a record daily energy delivery of 128,370.75 megawatt-hours. The company’s managing director, Sule Ahmed Abdulaziz, told a parliamentary summit earlier this year that the grid can wheel up to 8,700MW, arguing that transmission is no longer the binding constraint. Against an installed generation capacity that the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission’s February 2026 factsheet put at 13,625MW, both the daily figure and the peak show how little of the paper capacity actually turns into supply.
The wider position has, on the government’s own account, improved through 2026. The Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, said at his 100 day briefing in Abuja on 21 September that generation and transmission had held above 5,000MW in recent weeks, up from a range of 3,700MW to 4,700MW before June, with a peak of 5,330MW in August and September. He credited the restoration of the 375MW Alaoji plant, offline for three years, and new transformers in Lagos and Abuja that he said unlocked additional transmission capacity.
Tegbe was candid that the gains have not yet reached most homes. In his words, national progress can coexist with an unreliable feeder in a particular community, and the next task is to translate the numbers into dependable supply at the customer level.
The reason those megawatts do not travel far is largely financial. The minister put the sector’s debt backlog at about N3.3 trillion, said an estimated N1.23 trillion had been raised to address part of it, and noted that ministries, departments and agencies alone owe more than N100 billion for electricity consumed. He described a self-reinforcing cycle in which unpaid bills starve gas supply and maintenance, unreliable supply depresses collections, and weak collections deepen the debt further.
On tariffs, Tegbe ruled out any immediate increase, saying the priority was stabilising the value chain rather than raising rates. He also reported about 350,000 meters installed in the first 100 days, taking cumulative installations to 1,004,260 as of August 2026, a figure that still leaves millions of customers unmetered and billed on estimate.
Set against that backdrop, Tuesday’s schedule is less a milestone than a routine measure of a familiar shortfall. About 5,403MW was available on the night, 4,379MW reached the DisCos, and everything in between went to losses, plant use and dedicated supply.
What the figures do not settle is the question that matters most to households and businesses, which is how much of the 4,379MW sent to distribution companies actually arrived at homes, shops and factories once weak feeders and further losses took their cut. Until distribution catches up with generation and transmission, daily readings like this one will keep showing supply that looks larger on the grid than it feels at the meter.