A small Lagos energy company, asking what's actually going on with Nigeria's grid.

Somewhere between the cake and the band, on the night of our wedding, we were on the phone with a generator company.

That isn't unusual in Nigeria. You can't throw a wedding here without a backup. You can't run a clinic, a cold room, a recording session, a birthday party, a Sunday service. Every important thing in this country quietly runs on a second grid stitched together from generators, inverters, jerry cans, extension cords, and somebody's cousin who lives down the road.

The question we kept circling that night wasn't about our event. It was about the country. Why is renting a generator the most reliable thing you can do with electricity in Nigeria? What is actually going on with the grid?

Nobody could give us a straight answer. Not the discos. Not the regulator. Not friends in the industry, not the internet, not the elders. Everyone had a feeling. Nobody had a number.

By the end of that night we'd more or less decided what to spend the next decade doing. Two things, in this order.

First, understand the sector. Aggregate the readings. Study the failures. Publish the picture nobody had bothered to draw. Decisions about Nigeria's power are still mostly made on vibes, decade-old papers, and whoever shouted last at the meeting. We wanted to change the floor.

Then, make the picture usable. Put it in the hands of the people and businesses making real decisions: where to build, where to back up, where to invest, where to leave alone. Data on its own doesn't fix anything. Data plus people who can use it might.

Watch the Grid is the first thing we built. It's an open-data project, not a product.

Volunteers across Nigeria send us short readings from wherever they are: a meter snapshot, a light-on / light-off, a timestamp, a location. We aggregate the readings into honest weekly numbers and publish what we find. Anyone can read the data. Anyone can use it.

The volunteers aren't paid in money — they're paid in finally being able to say, with certainty, what their own street is like. That's where most of Bulb's energy is right now, and where it'll stay until the picture we're drawing is good enough to lean on.

We didn't build this for ourselves. We built it because the people who quietly keep the country running all rely on electricity data, and most of them are guessing.

The venue manager planning a Saturday wedding. The cold-chain operator deciding whether Lekki is worth the route. The bank scoring an SME. The hospital sizing its backup. The journalist trying to write the truth about last week's blackout. The neighbour wondering whether to invest in solar before the next rains. All of them are making real decisions on power, and almost none of them have a number they trust.

If a country can't see itself clearly, it can't fix itself. We want a Nigeria where the answer to is the light on in Surulere this week? is something you can look up in five seconds, with confidence, and use to decide.

Bulb is an energy company. Not a think tank, not a startup blog, not a chart on a slide. We're trying to bring three things into one practice — energy, innovation, and data — so that understanding Nigeria's power and serving Nigeria's power eventually become the same job.

We're early. We're small. We plan to stay small for as long as it takes to do this honestly.

• 01

  Every reading counts.

  The numbers we publish are the numbers we collected. We don’t prune the inconvenient ones, and we don’t round them off to make the chart look better.

• 02

  The data is open.

  What we measure, we publish. Anyone can read it, anyone can use it. We’re building the floor, not a fence.

• 03

  We don’t pretend to know what we don’t.

  When the picture is partial, we say so on the page. The job is to be useful, not to look smart.

• 04

  We answer the phone.

  Not a call centre, not a chatbot. One of us, usually within the hour, often faster.