Electricity Consumers Owe DisCos N385.7bn

Electricity consumers across the country failed to pay the sum of 385.73bn electricity bills issued to them in 2023.

According to the 2023 annual report and accounts of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), the DisCos collected N1bn out of the total bill of N1.46bn issued to customers.

NERC said this translates to a collection efficiency of 73.64% which implies that for every 100.00 worth of energy billed to customers by DisCos in 2023, approximately 26.36 was not recovered from customers.

“The low collection efficiency combined with billing inefficiency has continued to adversely impact the financial liquidity of the industry, ultimately limiting the NESI’s ability to grow and attract investment,” it said.

It noted that only Ikeja DisCo had a collection efficiency above 90 per cent which can be partly attributed to the fact that it leads the DisCos in terms of overall metering rate (72.54 per cent) as of the end of 2023.

This was followed by Eko and Abuja DisCos with collection efficiencies of 84.31 per cent and 80.19 per cent respectively. But Yola DisCo had the lowest collection efficiency of 43.56 per cent.

It went on to state that the federal government paid N610.06bn subsidy to make up for shortfalls DisCos did not pay for invoices for NBET out of N1.2bn, as they paid N685.69bn.

“An MRO-adjusted invoice of N858bn was issued by NBET and MO for energy costs and administrative services to DisCos in 2023. The DisCos remitted a total of N706.7bn, resulting in a deficit of N151.3bn during the year, this underpayment is known as “market shortfall”. Based on the above, the gross DisCo remittance rate to the upstream segment for 2023 was 82.37 percent,” it said.

It added that on average, the available generation capacity of the twenty-seven (27) grid connected power plants was 4,544.31MW.

A review of monthly data showed that during the year (2023), the average available generation capacity peaked in March, October and November.