Nigeria intends to raise installed electricity capacity to 277 gigawatts by 2060, Minister of Power Joseph Tegbe said at the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Renewable Energy Outlook Conference on June 26, 2026, setting out the long-term scale of the country’s energy transition strategy.
Reaching that target would require an additional $10 billion in annual investment, Tegbe said, but could save Nigeria an estimated $121 billion in fuel costs over the life of the plan. The strategy combines renewable energy, natural gas and increased private investment; no single technology is expected to carry it alone.
The target is set against a current installed base of more than 13,000MW, of which less than half is consistently delivered to consumers, a gap the government is also addressing through a $1.16 billion grid digitalisation programme nearing completion.
The figures echo an earlier call from Vice President Kashim Shettima, who said in 2025 that Nigeria needs $10 billion a year in energy-transition investment to meet its 2060 target, the same conclusion a year apart: the financing gap, not the choice of technology, is the strategy’s real constraint.
Why this matters
A national number that private capital has to fill
A $10 billion annual gap is too large for the federal budget or official development finance alone to close, which is exactly why Nigeria’s energy strategy leans so heavily on private investment and a mixed stack of gas and renewables instead of a single state-led build-out. That structure favours privately financed generation built close to demand, the independent power platform model Nova operates.
Gas sitting alongside renewables, not renewables on their own, matters too. It suggests the policy environment over the next three decades will keep rewarding developers who can blend generation technologies to match load, rather than a strategy staked on one source alone.