Rural households represent, by far, the greater percentage of dwellings globally without access to the electricity supply. For reasons of low loads, distance from the grid and speed of deployment, distributed energy systems are now considered viable options for rural electrification. This paper presents the status of solar Photovoltaic (PV) in Nigeria and discusses the way forward for aggressive PV penetration in Nigeria's energy mix, especially in rural communities. At present, distributed PV penetration in Nigeria is comparatively low based on the International Energy Association's recommended PV market potential. This shows that there is a gap between the government's policy targets and reality. The solar resource potential across the six geo-political zones in Nigeria is also presented, which ranges from 3.393 -6.669 kWh/ m 2 /day, with the Northern zones exhibiting better potentials over the Southern zones. It is shown that the levelised cost of electricity from PV system ranges from 0.387 -0.475 $/kWh, whereas it is 0.947 US$/kWh and 0.559 US$/kWh for the diesel generator and glass-covered kerosene lamp, respectively. While this study shows that PV for rural household lighting is more affordable as compared to glass-covered kerosene lamps and fossil-fuelled generators for lighting, fiscal and energy policies for market creation are critical if PV systems are to deliver on their promise for rural electrification and climate change mitigation.

This paper presents eight hybrid renewable energy (RE) systems that are derived from solar, wind and biomass, with energy storage, to meet the energy demands of an average household in the six geopolitical zones of Nigeria. The resource assessments show that the solar insolation, wind speed (at 30 m hub height) and biomass in the country range, respectively, from 4.38–6.00 kWh/m2/day, 3.74 to 11.04 m/s and 5.709–15.80 kg/household/day. The HOMER software was used to obtain optimal configurations of the eight hybrid energy systems along the six geopolitical zones’ RE resources. The eight optimal systems were further subjected to a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) analysis, which considers technical, economic, environmental and socio-cultural criteria. The TOPSIS-AHP composite procedure was adopted for the MCDM analysis in order to have more realistic criteria weighting factors. In all the eight techno-economic optimal system configurations considered, the biomass generator-solar PV-battery energy system (GPBES) was the best system for all the geopolitical zones. The best system has the potential of capturing carbon from the atmosphere, an attribute that is desirous for climate change mitigation. The cost of energy (COE) was seen to be within the range of 0.151–0.156 US$/kWh, which is competitive with the existing electricity cost from the national grid, average 0.131 US$/kWh. It is shown that the Federal Government of Nigeria favorable energy policy towards the adoption of biomass-to-electricity systems would make the proposed system very affordable to the rural households.

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