Electricity woes drive sevenfold jump in solar company registrations

…370 companies enter Nigeria’s market

Nigerians fed up with unreliable grid power and costlier fuel are turning to solar in such numbers that new company registrations in the sector have jumped almost sevenfold since 2019, offering some of the clearest evidence of a boom that official statistics are failing to capture.

Some 370 new solar companies were registered in Nigeria in 2025, versus 56 in 2019, according to Ember’s analysis of the country’s Corporate Affairs Commission register. The surge is part of a continent-wide shift detailed in a report published in August by the energy think tank Ember and the African Tech Futures Lab.

The report estimates Africa will install a record 17 gigawatts of solar this year, up 45 percent from 2025. Nigeria is one of six African countries now installing at gigawatt scale, with an estimated 1.7 GW this year.

For many Nigerian households and businesses, the appeal is simple arithmetic. Diesel generators have long filled the gap left by the grid, and fuel costs have climbed since the government removed its fuel subsidy in May 2023. It also raised tariffs sharply the following year for “Band A” customers, who receive the most reliable supply and pay the most for it, according to the report. That made generating their own power the cheaper option for anyone with access to capital.

Ember’s analysis shows how lopsided the economics can be. Generating the same electricity from diesel as a solar panel produces would cost as much in fuel every three months as the panel itself, at a diesel price of $1.40 a litre. Panels typically last 30 years or more.

Batteries are increasingly part of the picture. Nigeria is China’s biggest battery customer in Africa by value, importing roughly $750 million of lithium-ion batteries in the 12 months through June, according to Ember’s data, against about $275 million of solar panels. The report says households and businesses are probably buying batteries to cover load-shedding hours instead of running generators. One company alone added 60 megawatts of solar to power mobile-phone masts in Nigeria.

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Hidden from view

Most of Africa’s solar growth is likely occurring on rooftops and behind the meter, and that is the segment hardest to track. Ember estimates that 75 percent of the 26 GW added across the continent from 2023 to 2025 was distributed solar, meaning small-scale, customer-side installations, much of it commercial and industrial.

Official data lag far behind. Ember puts Africa’s 2025 installations at 12.0 GW, roughly twice the 6.2 GW from the International Energy Agency and the 4.6 GW from the International Renewable Energy Agency. The authors could find official national solar capacity figures for only 36 of Africa’s 54 countries, and only 14 of those covered 2025. Just South Africa, Tunisia and Tanzania publish any solar data monthly or quarterly.

Even in countries that do report, the numbers appear to miss the boom. Many installations are carried out informally, the report says, and the absence of distributed-generation rules leaves privately owned systems with no formal route into the market and no incentive to register.

That is why company registries matter as a proxy. Similar surges show up elsewhere: South Africa certified 638 installation companies in 2023 alone, and Kenya’s regulator licensed about six times as many solar firms in 2023-24 as in 2019-20.

Planning gap

The authors warn that the data gap has consequences. Planners who leave out distributed solar may overestimate demand, procure unneeded generation or choose the wrong mix of power sources. The African Union’s Continental Power Systems Masterplan forecasts 23 GW of solar by 2040, less than the 26 GW Ember estimates was installed in the last three years alone.

“Across Africa, distributed energy resources are rapidly expanding, and in many cases, overtaking grid capacity,” Joel Nana, research director at the African Tech Futures Lab, said in the report. He called the transition “chaotic and disruptive” compared with the orderly model in national strategies.

There are also trade-offs for the grid. The report notes that forcing businesses into self-generation at two to four times the all-in cost of utility-scale power is a poor foundation for industrial competitiveness. Large customers that leave the grid also take with them revenue that helps cross-subsidize poorer households, worsening the finances of already fragile utilities.

Manufacturing Lags

Nigeria’s solar panel manufacturing has not kept pace with demand. Ember estimates the country’s 2026 output at roughly triple 2024 levels, helped by a 200 MW Lagos plant run by LPV Technologies that started up in January 2025. The rural electrification agency puts national capacity at 300 MW, up from 120 MW two years earlier, though no Nigerian manufacturer publishes output.

Larger plans have stalled. Tranos broke ground on an 800 MW plant in June 2025 but hasn’t commissioned its first line, while a 1 GW project proposed by Solarge and InfraCorp has neither construction nor a site, according to the report. The bulk of Africa’s installed panels, 94%, are still imported from China.

Nigeria’s solar additions from 2023 to 2026 equal about a third of its 2023 grid capacity, by Ember’s estimate. Nana said the choice for policymakers is whether distributed assets remain “a parallel power system” that compensates for grid failure or are integrated so the benefits spread more widely.