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We measure it. By zone, by hour, by season — recorded by people who live there, deduped, and published openly under CC BY 4.0.
An open-data project to make Nigeria's electricity legible, by gathering it ourselves. We deploy sensors and people across the country to record what the grid is actually doing, then publish the truth.
We started in Lagos because that's where Bulb works every day. These are the most recent readings from each zone we cover. The pilot expands as volunteers join.
Live snapshot
Each cell is one hour, summarising every citizen-reported reading that landed in that window. Hover any cell for the exact split.
Available generation, on a good day
< 5gigawatts
For more than 220 million people. Lagos alone is roughly Tokyo's size. The numbers do not work, and they have not worked for a very long time.
Generation per person · annualised average watts
Lower is worse
Sources: TCN generation averages, World Bank population data. Numbers rounded; the gap is real. A Lagos household with ~4 hours of grid power per day gets a fraction even of the 24-watt figure.
Nigeria runs on stories. The fridge that hummed for two hours last night. The salon that lost a wedding clientele to a four-day blackout. The estate where the light comes back at 3 a.m. and goes again before the kettle boils. Everyone has a story; nobody can show you the data.
That is not because the data does not exist. It is because nobody has bothered to gather it consistently, publish it openly, and let the public hold both the grid and themselves to account. Decisions about generation, tariffs, and infrastructure get made on the back of spreadsheets the public never sees. Conversations about the energy transition happen in conference rooms in Abuja while the rest of the country lights candles.
Watch the Grid is our small contribution to changing that. We log when the light goes and when it comes back, where we can measure them. We collect voltage and frequency snapshots. We publish what we find, in machine-readable form, free for anyone to use, for journalism, research, policy, or just for knowing. Bulb runs the program. Citizens make the data.
We collect a small set of measurements very consistently, not a sprawling dashboard. Every column has to earn its place by helping someone make a decision they could not make before.
Schematic · shape, not values
Outage events
Timestamped on/off reports from volunteers across the country. The simplest input, and the most powerful when aggregated.
One tick = one event · 24-hour rolling window
Voltage & frequency
Where volunteers have meters, we collect periodic voltage and 50 Hz frequency snapshots. Sustained drift is what kills appliances.
Green band = nominal · marker = drift sample
Restoration patterns
Median restoration time, by zone and by hour of day. The patterns reveal which feeders are healthy and which are surviving on duct tape.
Distribution of restoration durations · 30-day
Regional generation
How much power each region's plants put onto the national grid, paired with our zone-level outage data, to see how generation maps onto reality on the ground.
Share of national generation · by region
Pipeline · raw → published
When the light goes and when it comes back. Voltage readings if you have a meter. Two minutes a day, total.
Reports merge with public generation data, weather, and our own field telemetry. Bad data is flagged and dropped.
A briefing, a downloadable dataset, a public dashboard. Anyone can use it: media, researchers, civil society.
Everything we collect goes back out, free, in formats anyone can use. We're not building a moat. We're building a public good.
Roughly 1,500 words, with charts. What happened on the grid this month, what changed, what to watch.
The full underlying data, anonymised at the volunteer level, refreshed weekly. Use it however you like.
Coming as the volunteer network expands. Outage frequency, restoration time, voltage health, by zone and by week.