How Much Is a Unit of Electricity in Abuja?

The generator is not a rival to the grid. It is the price of the grid not arriving.

The comparison every Abuja household eventually runs is grid against generator, and it is usually framed as a choice. It is not one.

At today's pump price, a small petrol generator produces a kilowatt-hour for several times what the same unit costs on any band — and that is before oil, servicing, the machine itself, or the noise. On the arithmetic alone the grid wins so heavily that the comparison looks pointless.

Which is the point. Nobody runs a generator because they think it is cheaper. They run it because the alternative at that moment is nothing. So the honest reading of the gap is not "the grid is better value" — everyone knows that. It is that the gap measures what unreliability costs. A Band A household that gets its committed 20 hours never pays the generator price. A Band D household on eight hours is buying the other sixteen at the generator rate, or doing without.

Put that way, the number below stops being a shopping comparison and becomes something closer to an outage tax: the premium a household pays for the hours the system did not deliver. It moves when the pump price moves, which is why this figure is computed from the fuel price on our own fuel page rather than typed in — when Dangote changes the gantry price, the cost of not having electricity in Abuja changes with it, and this page updates on its own.

One caution about the comparison, and it runs in the direction you would not expect: the generator figure below is too kind. It counts fuel only. It does not count engine oil, servicing, or the cost of the generator itself spread over its life — all of which are real and all of which make the machine worse. We have left them out because we cannot source them honestly, which means the true gap is wider than the one shown.

— abuja.cool desk

The seven-day rule, and how to use it

Buried in paragraph 19 of a scanned regulatory order is the most useful consumer right in the Nigerian electricity system, and almost nobody writes about it properly.

Paragraph 19(e): where AEDC fails to meet the committed service level on a Band A feeder for seven consecutive days, the feeder "shall be automatically downgraded to the recorded level of supply" under section 6 of Order NERC/2023/003. Automatically. Not on application, not at the DisCo's discretion.

What that is worth depends on where the feeder lands, and it is not small. A Band A household pays ₦209.50 a unit. A Band B household pays ₦63.35. If a feeder that has not been delivering its 20 hours drops to Band B, the same electricity costs less than a third as much — and the customer was, by definition, not receiving Band A service in the first place.

Two more obligations make the rule usable rather than theoretical.

Paragraph 19(c) requires AEDC to publish, daily on its website and by 10am the next day, a rolling seven-day average of daily supply hours for every Band A feeder. That is the evidence, and the regulator has already ordered it to be public.

Paragraph 19(d) requires that after just two consecutive days below commitment, AEDC publish an explanation and a restoration timeline.

So the practical sequence is: find out which feeder serves you, from your bill, your vending receipt or by asking your AEDC business unit. Watch the published rolling average, and keep your own log of outages with dates and times — a phone note is enough. If the feeder misses its commitment seven days running, the downgrade is already supposed to have happened; if it has not, you have the order, the paragraph number and the DisCo's own published figures to point at, and NERC's complaint process to point them at.

This page is not legal advice and cannot file anything for you. But the rule is real, it is current, and the evidence you would need is meant to be published every morning.

— abuja.cool desk

Seventeen Abuja feeders are already owed compensation

The seven-day rule is not hypothetical, and the proof is in the same document.

Appendix 2 of the July 2026 order is titled "Feeders for Compensation of Customers Only Due to Failure of Service". It names seventeen Band A feeders in AEDC's regulated area whose customers are to be compensated, with the streets each one serves, and the hours it actually delivered between the 1st and 21st of June.

They are not distant failures. Wuse II at 19.95 hours against a 20-hour commitment. Kubwa — Army Resettlement, Papal Ground, Aso Garden — at 19.71. Jabi, serving the Federal Ministry of Works and Housing, at 19.57. Karu at 18.14. Several more, including the feeders serving the National Assembly Complex and the Supreme Court, are recorded as affected by transmission maintenance rather than given an hours figure, and their customers are on the list all the same.

Two things are worth noticing.

The first is how narrow some of the misses are. A feeder delivering 19.95 hours against a 20-hour commitment has fallen three minutes a day short. That still counts, and the regulator still directs compensation, because the commitment is what the higher tariff was granted for. A band is a promise with a price attached.

The second is that this list exists at all, in a public document, with street names in it. Nigerian electricity regulation is often described as an unaccountable black box. Here is the regulator naming the feeder serving the Supreme Court and directing a refund. Whatever else is true about the sector, that is on the record.

If your street is on this list, you are owed something. The order does not set out the amount here — that mechanism sits in Order NERC/2023/003 — and we are not going to invent a figure for it.

— abuja.cool desk