Barriers to Nigeria’s Energy Transition: Financing, Infrastructure and Governance Challenges

Nigeria’s Energy Transition Plan (ETP) is a major policy initiative to address Nigeria’s longstanding energy-access challenge, reliance on fossil fuels, infrastructure limitations, and escalating climate-development pressures. But, financial, infrastructure, institutional, technological and political barriers still limit the translation of transition ambitions into measurable energy outcomes. This work explores the main challenges to implementing Nigeria’s ETP and opportunities to address them to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7). This study used a mixed methods design with a questionnaire survey of 150 stakeholders (including energy policy makers, energy professionals and project developers); 12 key informant interviews conducted in a semi-structured manner; and secondary data from national and international energy institutions. Descriptive statistics, mean scores, correlation and analysis of variance were used for quantitative analysis and thematic analysis for qualitative analysis. The results show that the highest barrier is financing constraints with a mean score of 4.50, followed by regulatory incoherence (4.20), political instability (4.00) and technological capacity gaps (3.80). Other evidence pointed to the fact that the electricity infrastructure and constraints on the electricity grid were another significant constraint, and a repeat survey placed a mean score of 4.30 on it. The qualitative evidence also suggests that funding constraints, lack of institutional responsibilities, and local lack of R&D capabilities and political continuity are mutually reinforcing, not independent barriers. Respondents also saw international climate finance (4.30), strengthening regulatory and governance capacities (4.30), greater private sector involvement (4.20), and technical capacity development (4.10) as areas that could help to accelerate implementation. It is therefore concluded that Nigeria’s transition to energy is not just a problem of availability of renewable energy but also one of capacity to implement renewable energy, financial architecture, infrastructure and institutional coordination. It suggests a combination of integrated transition financing, acceleration of grid modernization, harmonization of regulations, increased federal-state coordination, greater use of decentralized renewable energy systems, and local technical capacity development and risk-sharing mechanisms that can crowd-in private investment. This article makes a contribution to the energy-transitions literature by elucidating the interplay of financial, infrastructural and governance factors in determining the implementation of energy-transition policy in a developing economy heavily dependent on fossil fuels.

Keywords: Energy transition, SDG 7, Financing and Infrastructure.