The Transmission Company of Nigeria says the national grid can now carry 8,700 megawatts, up from roughly 7,000 — an increase of about 1,700 MW. Over the same period the highest generation the country has ever achieved was 5,801.84 MW, recorded on 4 March 2025. On that day the grid delivered 128,370.75 megawatt-hours, the most in Nigerian history.
Put the two numbers beside each other and the significance is hard to miss. The transmission network is no longer the binding constraint on Nigerian electricity supply.
That is a genuine reversal. For most of the past two decades the grid was the thing that failed — the reason power generated in the south could not reach demand in the north, and the reason a fault in one place took the whole system down with it.
What was actually built
Between January 2024 and November 2025 the company commissioned 82 new power transformers, adding more than 8,500 MVA to the grid. Sule Ahmed Abdulaziz, TCN’s managing director and chief executive, has pointed to that programme as the basis for the higher wheeling figure.
The financing came largely from outside. More than $1.4 billion has been mobilised from development lenders — among them the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the Japan International Cooperation Agency.
A transformer is not, on its own, capacity. It has to arrive with the bays that connect it, the circuit breakers and disconnectors that isolate it, the protection relays that decide when to open them, and the SCADA that lets an operator see any of it. Eighty-two transformers implies a great deal of switchgear alongside them.
Pressly has documented two such sites. The Kwara 330 kV substation combines two 150 MVA transformers, six 330 kV bays and a variable line reactor on a greenfield site. The Nnewi substation carries four transformers totalling 800 MVA across three switchyards in Anambra State.
The constraint has moved, not disappeared
A grid that can carry more than the country generates is not a solved grid. It is a grid whose problem now sits somewhere else.
Nigeria’s shortfall has moved upstream to generation — gas supply, plant availability, the commercial arrangements that determine whether a generator runs at all — and downstream to distribution, where the companies that actually deliver power to customers remain the weakest link in the chain.
Federal targets put transmission capacity at 10,000 MW by the end of 2026. Reaching it would widen the gap between what the grid can carry and what the country produces still further.
There is a reasonable argument that this is the correct order to build in. Transmission takes longest to plan, to right-of-way, and to construct; a network built only to today’s generation would constrain tomorrow’s. But capacity that is never used is also capital that is not yet earning, and the case for continuing to build it rests on generation eventually catching up.
The figures
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Wheeling capacity | 8,700 MW |
| Previous capacity | ~7,000 MW |
| Capacity added | ~1,700 MW |
| Transformers commissioned | 82 (Jan 2024 – Nov 2025) |
| Substation capacity added | ~8,500 MVA |
| Record peak generation | 5,801.84 MW (4 March 2025) |
| Record daily energy | 128,370.75 MWh |
| Development financing mobilised | Over $1.4bn |
| Federal target | 10,000 MW by end 2026 |
Capacity and generation figures in this article are as stated publicly by the Transmission Company of Nigeria and reported in the Nigerian press. Pressly has not independently verified them.
