By Engr. Olawale Olapegba, Power Utilities & Infrastructure Consultant, International Energy Services Ltd
Customer Service Week 2026 carries the theme “The Extra Mile.” For the electricity industry, it invites a question that goes beyond call centres and response times: what is the extra mile when customers can increasingly create the service the utility is supposed to provide? Utilities have long been businesses of physical distance, moving power from generation through transmission and distribution to the customer. That final stretch is the last mile, and for the modern customer, it is merely infrastructure. The extra mile is relationship, relevance and value: the reason a customer remains economically dependent on the connection once it exists.
That reason matters because Nigerian customers now have alternatives. Solar panels generate power during the day, batteries store it for later use, inverters manage the supply, generators provide backup, efficiency reduces demand, and mini-grids and embedded generation serve communities and industrial clusters. The customer is no longer just a consumer of electricity but an energy manager, and quietly, a competitor to the utility.
A recent study of Pakistan’s solar boom by Wajid Islam, Jan Rosenow and Asha Amirali shows how this unfolds. It distinguishes visible grid defection — where a customer disconnects or switches providers —from invisible defection, where the customer stays connected but meets more of their needs elsewhere. The meter remains, and the account stays active, but purchases decline. A factory with solar and storage, a household using the grid only for backup, or an estate drawing on it only when its own resources fall short has not technically left. Yet, part of that customer has already defected. This is customer-side virtualisation. The steady substitution of private generation, storage, efficiency and flexible demand for services once bought entirely from the central system. Utilities are being virtualised not through dramatic disconnections but one kilowatt-hour at a time.
Nigeria is not Pakistan, and its market structure, regulation and resource base differ. But the underlying economics apply. Years of inadequate supply, network constraints, and heavy reliance on private generation, combined with increasingly accessible solar, batteries, and inverters, create a simple equation: high cost of grid dependence + poor reliability + falling distributed-energy costs = a growing incentive to self-supply. This is an economic argument, not an environmental one. Customers want power that is available when needed, priced predictably, and suited to their activity. Where the grid cannot deliver, they look elsewhere. For many, solar is less a renewable technology than a reliability technology.
This shifts the commercial battleground from customer numbers to the energy wallet. A distribution company (DisCo) may report a million connected customers, while its most valuable ones steadily shift their spending toward diesel, solar, batteries, and captive generation. The right question is how much of each customer’s energy spending the DisCo still captures. If a commercial customer cuts grid purchases from 100 units to 40 after installing solar and storage, 60% of that sales opportunity has migrated, even though the account never closed. Across thousands of customers, the revenue impact is substantial, and a customer can leave the utility’s revenue pool long before leaving the grid.
Tariffs complicate this further. Higher tariffs help utilities recover legitimate costs, but without matching improvements in reliability, quality, and predictability, they also improve the return on investment in alternative energy. The same increase that lifts revenue per kilowatt-hour makes self-supply more attractive. A tariff, therefore, cannot be judged apart from service quality, because customers buy a service, not isolated kilowatt-hours, and will eventually compare the cost of grid dependence with the cost of self-supply. That comparison is already underway.
It is also why the 24/7 electricity ambition and improved service zones should be seen as a market-retention strategy as much as a reliability programme. The real test is whether improved supply can recapture spending that is now leaking into private generation. Customers who have invested years and capital in generators, inverters, batteries, and solar have already gone the extra mile and will not abandon those assets simply because supply improves. The grid must become economically compelling enough, in reliability, quality, convenience and value, for them to reconsider the size of their private portfolios. That is a commercial challenge, not merely a technical one.
Meeting this challenge begins with measuring service where customers actually experience it. A feeder can satisfy a supply standard at the 33kV breaker while customers at the tail end suffer a very different reality, particularly when faults leave downstream sections unrestored. Energised networks are not the same as served customers. Distribution-transformer monitoring, customer-level data, voltage-quality information and feeder segmentation give a more credible picture. The last mile must be measured at the last mile.
Credibility also depends on how the utility treats customer-funded infrastructure. Customers have long contributed to transformers, poles, conductors, and extensions, and where a utility takes over such assets, that investment should not be removed from the equation. Transparent valuation, compensation, energy credits or service arrangements can recognise it. This is a matter of trust. Customers who have invested capital in the network should feel that the relationship acknowledges it.
Tariff design must carry the same logic. As customers gain choices over when to consume and whether to generate or store, the structure of charges shapes whether they stay economically connected. Fixed and variable charges, time-of-use rates, standby services, demand charges and net billing for distributed resources can all serve as retention tools rather than mere regulatory mechanisms. Execution matters, though. A customer left waiting indefinitely for interconnection or settlement will find another route, and a slow interconnection is a wallet walking out the door to whoever moves faster.
DisCos, therefore, need a new commercial capability. Beyond asking who their customers are, how much they use and how much they pay, they must ask who is investing in solar and batteries, which industrial customers are expanding captive generation, who is cutting grid consumption and why, and what reliability would bring them back. A Customer Energy Wallet Map can answer this by showing where spending leaks to competing sources. Customer service then becomes commercial intelligence. A voltage complaint may signal a customer preparing to invest in alternatives; a transformer upgrade request may signal industrial expansion; falling consumption may reflect efficiency gains or solar adoption; and a drop in evening demand may point to batteries. The service platform becomes an early-warning system for defection.
With that intelligence, the DisCo can move from selling electricity to orchestrating energy. The future is not grid versus solar but an integrated mix: solar for daytime energy, batteries for flexibility, generators as contingency, efficiency to trim waste, and the grid for balancing, access, resilience and top-up supply. The utility may not sell every kilowatt-hour a customer uses. But it can remain the preferred energy platform by partnering with solar firms, facilitating battery storage, offering energy-management services, aggregating distributed resources, and serving estates and industrial clusters. Demand-side flexibility can ease network constraints, turning distributed energy from a threat into an asset. The wire remains important, but as part of a broader service architecture.
Ownership can strengthen that architecture. Cooperatives, franchises, and community energy models give customers a stake in the systems that serve them, and people protect what they co-own. They move the relationship from transactional to participatory, which matters more as decentralisation accelerates.
None of this can rest on individual heroics. Customer Service Week rightly honours the engineers patrolling networks at midnight, the technicians restoring transformers, the commercial officers resolving disputes, the care agents taking difficult calls and the field teams working through rain and heat. They walk the extra mile after the last mile is built. But structural problems cannot be solved permanently through personal sacrifice. The extra mile must become system design, embedded in how the utility measures service, designs tariffs, manages relationships, responds to distributed energy, values customer investment, plans networks and allocates capital.
The Nigerian customer shows why. He bought the generator, inverter, battery, and solar system, paid for the wiring, and sometimes even contributed to the cost of the transformer. He walked the extra mile because the system required it. Now the industry must walk its own by building the wire for the customer it wants to keep, pricing around economic customers that can be understood and defended, measuring service where it is experienced, recognising customer capital, easing interconnection, understanding where defection is happening, and offering products that keep customers connected even as they generate part of their own power.
Pakistan’s experience warns that defection need not begin with a dramatic disconnection. It can happen quietly, one panel, one battery and one lost kilowatt-hour at a time. Nigeria need not follow that path, but the forces behind it are already present. The choice for DisCos is not simply whether to fight or welcome distributed energy, but whether they can redesign their service architecture so that it becomes part of the relationship rather than evidence of its failure. The market will not be won by owning more wires. It will be won by the utility that understands what customers value, where their energy wallets are moving, and which mix of grid and distributed resources delivers the best value.
That brings us back to the theme of Customer Service Week 2026. The last mile is the wire. The extra mile is the architecture that gives customers a reason to keep using it. In tomorrow’s electricity industry, a customer may stay physically connected while becoming economically disconnected from the utility. The real challenge is to make staying connected the smartest choice.