Nigeria’s Grid Cannot Be Fixed Without Interoperability

Glory Joe-Ibekwe

I have seen what happens when power systems are built to work together, and I have seen what happens when they are not. Nigeria’s electricity crisis will not end until we stop treating the grid as a set of separate businesses and start running it as one interoperable system. Repeated national grid collapses continue to expose the severe instability of Nigeria’s power sector and the fragility of its transmission infrastructure. At the same time, the country generates far below the roughly 30,000MW required for stable electricity supply, while often delivering less than 5,000MW to a population of over 200 million. This gap is more than an inconvenience; it represents a structural failure that burdens households, constrains industry, and undermines confidence in public institutions.

What the U.S. energy sector taught me is that a modern grid survives because its parts are designed to cooperate. IEEE 1547 is a model of that thinking: it sets technical requirements for interconnection and interoperability of distributed energy resources, including performance, operation, testing, safety, maintenance, and security considerations. In the United States, the market and regulatory architecture also creates a coordination layer through FERC and the ISO/RTO structure, so the system does not depend on each actor behaving independently. That is the discipline Nigeria lacks.

Our problem is not only low generation. It is a broken operating model. GenCos generate power that cannot always be moved. TCN struggles with a transmission network that remains the sector’s weakest link. DisCos receive a limited and unstable supply, then ration what little reaches consumers, while still living off a billing structure that rarely matches service quality. When every segment optimizes for itself, the nation gets blackouts instead of electricity.

Interoperability matters because it forces standards, visibility, and accountability across the whole chain. In the U.S. framework, grid-connected devices do not enter the system as isolated objects; they are required to communicate, respond, and integrate according to shared technical rules. That is exactly what Nigeria should have done years ago with metering platforms, SCADA systems, dispatch tools, substations, and emerging distributed energy resources. Instead, we built islands of technology and then acted surprised when the ocean between them became a fault line.

The Nigerian power sector’s fragmentation is also institutional. DisCos, TCN, and GenCosoperate as disconnected entities because governance has allowed each one to defend its own narrow mandate instead of one coordinated national outcome. The result is weak dispatch discipline, poor data exchange, slow fault response, and endless blame-shifting. If a unit trips in one part of the chain, the whole country feels it because the system does not share a common operational language. That is not just a technical problem. It is a management failure.
Nigeria must now take five hard steps.

First, NERC should make interoperability a licensing requirement for every new grid-connected asset. No utility, inverter, meter, storage platform, or dispatch tool should be approved unless it meets open standards for data exchange, control, and testing. Second, TCN must be restructured into a genuinely modern system operator with real-time visibility, automated fault coordination, and transparent performance reporting. A transmission network that cannot see, predict, and isolate failure fast enough cannot be trusted to hold a national grid.

Third, Nigeria needs a national coordination architecture that plays the role of an ISO/RTO layer. Someone must sit above the fragmentation and enforce operational discipline across generation, transmission, and distribution. Fourth, the grid code must be updated to reflect modern interoperability expectations. That means defined communication protocols, cybersecurity requirements, common information models, and mandatory testing before assets are allowed to interact with the grid. Fifth, enforcement must become non-negotiable. Standards without penalties are public relations. Nigeria has had enough of that.

My experience in grid-adjacent systems taught me a simple truth: reliability is designed, not wished into existence. If equipment, software, and institutions cannot talk to one another, failure is not accidental; it is guaranteed. The U.S. energy sector understood that years ago, which is why standards like IEEE 1547 matter and why coordination structures matter just as much.

Minister of Power, this is the moment to stop managing symptoms and start rebuilding the operating logic of the grid. NERC, this is the moment to regulate for interoperability, not merely compliance on paper. Nigeria does not need another round of excuses. It needs a grid that works as one system.