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Enugu State and the United Kingdom have completed a pilot programme deploying artificial intelligence-enabled smart meters across a section of the state capital, producing early results that officials say demonstrate how the technology can address one of the most stubborn problems in Nigeria’s power sector — the haemorrhaging of revenue through theft, billing failures and undetected losses that have made electricity distribution a financial black hole for decades.
The pilot, funded by UK International Development and implemented by Tetra Tech through the UK Nigeria Infrastructure Advisory Facility, placed 846 smart meters in the Ugwuaji axis of Enugu and its surrounding semi-urban communities beginning in November 2025. The results were presented Tuesday at the Enugu State Investor Forum, where distribution companies, policymakers and private investors gathered to examine what the technology had produced and what it would take to scale it across the state.
The system works by creating a continuous, verifiable data trail from transformer to household — every unit of electricity generated at source tracked through the distribution network to the point of consumption. Gaps in that trail, where power enters the system and does not reach a paying customer, become visible in real time. The AI layer analyses patterns in consumption data to flag irregularities that human monitoring would miss: sudden drops in measured flow that suggest tampering, consumption profiles that don’t match household characteristics, equipment anomalies that precede faults. A utility running this system does not wait to discover it has been robbed. It watches the theft as it happens and moves to stop it.
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Chijioke Okonkwo, chairman of the Enugu State Electricity Regulatory Commission, framed the significance plainly. “This system allows us to drastically reduce, if not eliminate, commercial and collection losses, which have long hindered the growth of the power sector,” he said. The losses he is describing are not incidental to Nigeria’s electricity crisis — they are structural. Distribution companies that cannot recover the revenue owed to them cannot service debt, cannot maintain infrastructure, cannot attract investment and cannot pay for the power they purchase from generators. The billing and collection problem sits upstream of almost every other dysfunction in the sector.
Nigeria’s electricity value chain has historically leaked at multiple points simultaneously. Metering gaps — customers billed on estimated rather than actual consumption — create both undercharging and disputes. Outright theft through illegal connections, bypassed meters and tampered equipment takes additional volumes. Collection failures, where bills are issued but not paid and not enforced, account for further losses. A system that makes all three categories visible and attributable changes the economics of distribution fundamentally, provided the regulatory and enforcement infrastructure exists to act on what the data reveals.
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Frank Edozie, team leader of UKNiAF, described the pilot as a proof of concept for AI-driven accountability in electricity revenue collection. “The system ensures that all revenues due to the sector are properly collected and accounted for,” he said. “It also detects any breach in energy or financial flows, making it a strong revenue assurance mechanism.”
Enugu was selected for the pilot partly because of the state’s position at the leading edge of the reforms enabled by Nigeria’s Electricity Act 2023, which gave states the authority to develop independent electricity markets separate from the federal framework. That legislative change created the regulatory space within which state-level innovations like this one become possible — Enugu’s electricity commission can set rules, attract investors and enforce standards in ways that were not available to states operating purely within the federal grid structure.
Ernest Mupwaya, managing director of MainPower Electricity Distribution Limited, connected the metering question directly to investment viability. Without reliable metering and revenue assurance, he argued, no serious investor will commit capital to Nigeria’s power sector, because the returns are too uncertain and the losses too unpredictable. “Smart metering, combined with advanced monitoring systems, gives utilities visibility across their networks, making it easier to detect losses and improve operational efficiency,” he said. The pilot has already demonstrated, he added, that private financing for metering infrastructure is achievable — if investors can see that improved revenue collection will allow them to recover their capital over time.
The cost of that infrastructure is not trivial. Single-phase smart meters are currently priced at approximately N130,000 per unit, while three-phase units run to about N230,000. Deploying them at the scale required to transform revenue collection across Enugu State, let alone Nigeria as a whole, would require financing structures that spread the cost across time — either through consumer payment plans, private investment with long-term revenue recovery arrangements, or public subsidy. Officials at the forum said flexible payment structures were being designed to ease adoption, without specifying the terms.
The 846-meter pilot in Ugwuaji is a small number against any serious accounting of Enugu’s total customer base. But pilot programmes are not meant to solve problems at scale — they are meant to demonstrate that a solution is real, that the technology functions as claimed, that the revenue improvements materialise in practice and not just in theory. On that narrower test, officials say the Enugu pilot has delivered.
