As of the second quarter of 2025, roughly 5.4 million electricity customers in Nigeria still had no meter. 45.7% of the country’s active customers were being billed on estimates — a number derived from a formula, not a reading. The National Mass Metering Programme exists precisely to close this gap, put at around 6.5 million connections, and the government has talked about closing it within 24 to 39 months. At the pace DisCos are actually installing meters — 225,711 in the whole of Q2 2025 — that timeline is difficult to square with the arithmetic.
The gap is not evenly spread. Ikeja Electric and Eko Electricity Distribution Company had metered 84.65% and 83.33% of their customers respectively as at mid-2025. Yola Electricity Distribution Company sat at 28.55%. Two customers on opposite ends of the country, paying the same national tariff structure, are living through completely different relationships with their DisCo — one reading a meter, the other arguing with an estimate.
Estimated billing is not a customer-service problem
It is tempting to file the metering gap under customer experience — annoyed households, disputed bills, complaints to the DisCo call centre. That undersells it. Every unmetered connection is also a hole in the loss numbers discussed everywhere else in this industry right now: an estimated bill is, definitionally, a guess at consumption, which means it is also a guess at revenue. Multiply that guess across 5.4 million connections and the metering gap stops being a service complaint and becomes one of the largest single contributors to the commercial-loss component of the ATC&C figure that keeps DisCos out of compliance with their NERC-mandated targets. Close the metering gap, and a DisCo is not just making customers happier — it is closing its own books.
Why the bottleneck is rarely the meter itself
Federal and state programmes tend to be framed as a procurement problem — buy enough meters, distribute them, done. In practice, the harder part sits downstream of the warehouse: verifying which address actually needs a meter, dispatching an installation crew to it, capturing proof that the install actually happened — GPS location, a photo, the meter’s serial number — and getting that serial number correctly synced into the billing system before the next cycle runs. A mass rollout that tracks this on paper job cards and spreadsheets loses meters, loses installation records, and loses the very revenue assurance the rollout was meant to create.
This is the layer Hermes and PowerTrack are built for. Hermes is a field data collection tool built specifically for the power sector: it lets install crews submit readings, photos, GPS location and other work-order data from any device, on the go, so an installation is proof-of-work the moment it happens rather than a claim reconciled weeks later. PowerTrack then takes over on the other side of that same meter — its Automated Meter Reading suite already tracks more than 6,000 trading/custody-transfer points across 11 distribution licensees, reading over 28.2 GWh of energy every month without a human walking a route with a clipboard. Closing the metering gap and ending estimated billing are the same project, end to end: install it, prove it happened, then read it automatically for as long as it’s in the ground.
The gap closes at the install crew, not the warehouse
None of this replaces the need to manufacture and purchase 6.5 million meters — that part of the problem is real and it is federal policy’s to solve. But a warehouse full of meters that never gets reliably matched to an address, an installer, and a billing record does not move the metering-rate number at all. The DisCos furthest ahead — Ikeja Electric, Eko Disco — got there by treating installation as an operational discipline with its own data trail, not a one-time logistics exercise. That is the gap PowerTech builds tools to close: not how many meters exist in a warehouse, but how reliably each one gets from that warehouse onto a wall, into the billing system, and into a monthly reading that reflects what actually happened — not what was estimated.
Sources: BusinessDay — Nigeria’s metering gap · ThisDay — 225,000 meters installed in Q2 amid 5.4m deficit · IBEDC — National Mass Metering Programme · CNBC Africa — Will Nigeria meet its metering target?.
