11kW on Every Roof in 11 Months: What the Numbers Actually Say

The promise

SDP presidential candidate Adewole Adebayo went on Arise TV this week with a specific number: 11 to 15 kilowatts of solar on every Nigerian roof, within 11 months of taking office in 2027. New manufacturing plants built with partners like China, Turkey and India. Solar clusters generating up to 32,000 megawatts. The national grid demoted to backup, not primary supply.

It's a genuinely striking pitch, and it's got people talking. I run a solar forecasting app, so naturally, I went and checked the maths against it.

The numbers

Nigeria's entire installed electricity generation capacity today — every gas plant and hydro dam combined — is 13,625MW. That's the nameplate figure. What actually reaches anyone is usually far less: NERC's own data put dispatched power at an average of 4,286MW in April. On a bad day it's worse — the grid fell to 1,132MW on a Saturday night in August, and cratered to 20MW during a full collapse in January.

The government's own long-range target — the one it's spending years and billions chasing — is 277,000MW. By 2060.

Adebayo's cluster figure alone, 32,000MW, is more than double everything Nigeria has installed right now. On his stated timeline, that's not a multi-decade grid build. It's eleven months.

The reality check

The underlying idea isn't fringe. Distributed rooftop solar is exactly how a lot of unreliable-grid countries have made real progress, and manufacturing partnerships with China, Turkey or India aren't hypothetical — that's how solar supply chains get built most places. What's already been flagged publicly, by energy economists rather than me, is the timeline: a strict 11-month build-out runs straight into real global supply constraints on lithium and polysilicon, whoever's doing the building.

I'm not going to tell you whether to believe a campaign promise. I build a solar app, not a crystal ball.

What you can actually check tonight

Your roof doesn't need a manufacturing partnership or an election result to have a number. It already has one: a real, physics-based peak-sun-hours figure for exactly where you are, Lagos to Kano, that tells you what solar could do for you today.

Sun Hours is free. No account for the forecast, no ads to unlock it, no eleven-month wait to find out. Whatever happens in 2027, you can check your own roof tonight.