In 2025, Nigeria’s electricity distribution companies lost 37.03% of the energy they were sent out to sell. Not to unpaid bills alone — to faulty transformers, overloaded lines, meter bypass, vandalized cable, and estimated readings that never matched real consumption. The Multi-Year Tariff Order only lets a DisCo recover the cost of a 20.54% loss rate from its customers. Everything above that line, the DisCo simply eats.
That gap — 37.03% against an allowed 20.54% — is arguably the single biggest number in Nigerian power right now. NERC calls it ATC&C: Aggregate Technical, Commercial and Collection loss. It is three different problems wearing one number. Technical loss is physical — an overloaded transformer, an aging conductor, resistance in a cable that should have been replaced years ago. Commercial loss is a meter bypassed, a connection that was never metered, consumption that was never billed. Collection loss is a bill correctly issued that simply never gets paid. NERC has responded by attaching real numbers to real deadlines: Abuja Electricity Distribution Company has been ordered to bring its losses down from 45% to 19% over five years; Yola, from 66% to 37%. The industry-wide target itself has been tightened, from 20.54% to 16.92% effective January 2026.
You cannot fix a loss you cannot locate
Here is the part that rarely makes the headlines: a DisCo cannot meaningfully close a loss it cannot locate. Losses don’t happen at the DisCo’s head office. They happen at a specific transformer, on a specific feeder, on a specific day — hidden inside a low-voltage network that, on most of the continent, is still inspected the way it was inspected thirty years ago: a technician with a clipboard, on a schedule measured in months, reacting to a complaint rather than catching the problem before it becomes one. By the time an overloaded transformer trips, or a feeder pillar is found stripped of cable, the loss has already been booked.
Grid Analytix exists to close that visibility gap. It is a cloud-based, mini-SCADA platform that sits at the transformer level — the exact layer where technical loss actually originates — and gives distribution companies real-time visibility into the supply flowing to and from each asset. It is live today across 52 strategic distribution transformers, feeder pillars and uprisers for Lagos State and a number of Independent Power Producers, continuously surfacing high technical losses, overload conditions, and rising failure rates in aging infrastructure, so that load balancing and energy optimization decisions get made from data instead of guesswork. For distribution companies that can’t justify the cost of a full SCADA rollout, it functions as a genuinely cost-effective alternative — the same category of decision, at a fraction of the capital outlay.
The results, where it has been deployed, are not marginal. Clients running Grid Analytix have reported annual revenue increases of up to 200% on the assets it monitors, and a 64% improvement in outage management, driven by predictive analysis catching failure conditions before they become outages rather than after.
Five-year targets need continuous evidence, not annual audits
NERC’s new approach — individualized, numeric, multi-year loss-reduction glide paths per DisCo — changes what “progress” has to look like. A DisCo telling its regulator it is “working on it” was survivable when the target was a single industry-wide average, reviewed occasionally. It is not survivable against a named trajectory — 45% to 19%, on a five-year clock, checked at intervals. That requires the same thing Genesis provides for supply hours: a continuous, auditable record, generated at the asset level, that can be checked against the target at any point — not reconstructed after the fact from whatever records survived the year.
That is the thread running through everything PowerTech has built since PowerCollect in 2015: the industry does not have a shortage of targets. NERC sets them constantly. What it has lacked is the instrumentation to know, in real time, which side of a target any given transformer, feeder, or DisCo actually sits on. Grid Analytix is that instrumentation for the loss line on the balance sheet — the same way PowerDash is for MDA billing, and Genesis is for supply-hour compliance.
Sources: BusinessDay — DisCos’ 37% loss rate · SundiataPost — NERC five-year DisCo performance plans · The Guardian — DisCo revenue recovery shortfall · NERC — 2025 Q1 Report.
