No, You Cannot Sell Solar Power to NEPA Yet
Net billing in Nigeria is real, and it starts at 50 kWp — around 7× the array on a large family home. If you live in a house, you cannot sell power to your DisCo under the 2026 regulations, and you should not let any installer price a system on the promise that you can.
Why everyone thinks otherwise
In June 2026 NERC announced the Net Billing Regulations 2026, allowing “prosumers” to export surplus solar to the grid and receive credit against their bill. The regulation was reported widely, and the headlines it produced — FG to pay Nigerians for excess solar power and variations on it — are a fair summary of the policy and a poor description of who it reaches.
Pulse put the limitation plainly: the scheme is “mainly for commercial, industrial, and institutional electricity users, not small residential solar installations” (Pulse Nigeria). That sentence is the whole article you are reading, and it did not travel nearly as far as the headline did.
What 50 kWp actually looks like
Take the largest residential load we publish a sizing page for — a four-bedroom house running two air conditioners — and build it at our Premium tier, the one with extra panels for cloudy-day recharge. That is 13 × 550W panels, an array of 7.15 kWp, costing ₦15M – ₦25.2M installed at September 2026 prices.
| System | Array size | Panels | Net billing? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Large family home, Premium build | 7.15 kWp | 13 × 550W | No — far below the floor |
| Net billing minimum | 50 kWp | ~91 × 550W | Entry point |
| Net billing maximum | 1.5 MWp | Utility-scale | Ceiling |
Roughly 91 panels. Not a roof — a car park, a factory shed, a school block, a warehouse. The floor is not an accident or an oversight to be lobbied away; it is there because connecting a generator to a distribution network involves protection, metering and a commercial agreement, and NERC has set the bar where that overhead is worth carrying.
What the process involves if you do qualify
- •DisCo approval. You apply to the distribution company whose network you are connected to. They assess whether your feeder can absorb the export. This is a technical assessment, not a formality.
- •A Net Billing Agreement. A commercial contract between you and the DisCo setting out how exported energy is valued and credited. Credit against your bill — not a cash payment.
- •NERC registration. The prosumer installation is registered with the regulator.
- •A bidirectional meter. A meter that measures energy in both directions. Your existing prepaid meter does not do this, and the cost of the new one sits with the project.
Read that list as a project plan rather than a form. It is months of work with a utility, and it only makes sense attached to a site whose electricity bill is large enough to justify the effort.
Who this is genuinely for
Estates with a common connection, factories and processing plants, schools and universities, hospitals, shopping malls, hotels, large cold-storage operations, and office buildings with a real daytime load. The pattern that makes net billing worth pursuing is a site that consumes heavily during the day and has roof or ground area to spare — because the export credit is only the tail end of the benefit. The main benefit is still offsetting your own daytime consumption at retail rates.
If that describes a site you are responsible for, the power side of it is worth costing independently of whoever is selling you the equipment. Our for builders and developers page covers how we work on larger projects, and what it costs to solar-power a cold room works through one commercial load end to end.
Why “get a home to 50 kWp” is the wrong goal
It would cost many times what your house needs, to produce energy you cannot use, in order to earn a credit against a bill you were trying to eliminate. Every step of that is backwards.
The economics of home solar in Nigeria are about self-consumption: a kWh you generate and use is worth the full retail tariff you did not pay, plus — for most households — the generator fuel you did not buy, which is worth considerably more again. No export tariff anywhere in the world pays better than not buying electricity. The correct home strategy is to size the array to your own daily consumption and the battery to your evening, which is exactly what our quote engine does.
What to watch for next
Two things would change this page. A lowered eligibility floor, which would have to come from NERC and has not been announced. And DisCo-level pilots or state-level schemes, which have a habit of arriving before the national rules catch up. We will update here if either happens — and we will say plainly that it happened, rather than quietly editing the page, because the whole point of this article is that you can trust what it said last month.
Until then, the practical answer for a homeowner is unchanged: size for what you use, get the bill down as far as the battery will take it, and treat any installer who mentions selling power back to the grid as someone who has not read the regulation.
Common questions
Can I sell solar power back to NEPA in Nigeria?
Not as a homeowner, no. The NERC Net Billing Regulations 2026 create a route for "prosumers" to export surplus solar and receive credit against their bill, but eligibility starts at 50 kWp and stops at 1.5 MWp. A large Nigerian home system is roughly 7.15 kWp, so residential systems fall far below the floor.
How big is 50 kWp in panels?
About 91 panels of 550W each, plus the roof or ground area to mount them. That is a factory, a school, a mall or an estate-scale installation — not a house.
What do the headlines mean when they say FG will pay Nigerians for excess solar?
They are describing the same regulation, accurately in outline and misleadingly in effect. The scheme is real. It is simply not aimed at households, and no homeowner should factor an export credit into whether a home system is affordable.
What should a homeowner do instead?
Size for self-consumption. Every kWh you generate and use yourself is worth the full retail tariff you did not pay, which is a better deal than any export credit would be anyway. The mistake is oversizing an array in the hope of selling the surplus — that surplus currently has nowhere to go and is simply money spent on panels that idle.
Size for what you actually use
Self-consumption is where the money is. The calculator sizes the array to your daily kWh and the battery to your evening, and shows you the bill of materials for all three tiers.