Nigeria Projected To Account For Half Of West Africa’s Electricity Demand Between 2025-2035

Nigeria has been projected to account for more than half of West Africa’s electricity demand which is expected to rise by about 4 per cent between 2025 to 2035.

Through the period Nigeria’s power sector demand will top other country’s energy demand while Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal together would represent about one-third of total demand.

Nigeria illustrates the scale of latent demand and the limits of relying on installed capacity alone. The country loses several days of productivity every month to blackouts, as grid volatility forces the system to rely on about 50 gigawatts of expensive off-grid self-generation, compared with 13 GW of unreliable on-grid capacity.

S&P Global Energy expects Nigeria’s electricity demand to rise from about 62 terawatt-hours in 2025 to more than 90 TWh by 2035, but how much of that demand is captured by the grid will depend on the pace of power-sector execution.

S&P Global Energy expects electricity demand across West Africa to grow at a compound annual growth rate of about 4 per cent between 2025 and 2035.

Together, these markets anchor the region’s main gas-to-power systems, cross-border supply routes and emerging large-load opportunities.

Larger cities and industrial clusters could increase demand for more reliable grids and captive power supplies where investment and infrastructure expansion advance.

Different sources of demand growth call for different infrastructure responses. Gradual growth in household and commercial demand points to continued grid expansion, distribution investment, loss reduction and improved tariff collection. Large, concentrated loads, including data centers, raise a different test: whether utilities can capture demand on terms that support reliable supply and reinvestment, rather than losing it to diesel, captive gas or distributed solar-plus-storage.

This makes available capacity a more relevant measure of adequate supply than installed capacity alone.

In many West African countries, available capacity is significantly lower than nameplate capacity because fuel shortages, hydrological variability, aging thermal assets, maintenance needs and transmission bottlenecks constrain parts of the installed fleet. Reserve margins can therefore tighten quickly when peak demand rises or fuel supply weakens, determining whether additional load is absorbed by the system or translates into higher load-shedding risk.

The report also showed that other West African markets face a different version of the same infrastructure test. Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire are more central to regional supply, while Senegal’s outlook is increasingly linked to urban growth and gas-to-power. Smaller importing markets remain exposed to the reliability of cross-border trade.