From Smart Export Guarantee to Peer-to-Peer Export Guarantee: Engineering a Decentralised Prosumer Electricity Market for Nigeria

Nigeria possesses roughly 13,625 MW of installed generation capacity yet delivers little more than a third of it to over 200 million people, with grid-connected plants operating at a 38% availability factor and a radial transmission network prone to voltage excursions and total collapse. The United Kingdom's Smart Export Guarantee (SEG) has been widely cited as a template for incentivising rooftop solar in Nigeria. This article argues that a direct transplant of the SEG-a prosumer-togrid export mechanism designed for a strong, fully-served network-is an engineering mismatch for Nigeria's supplyconstrained system, and instead proposes a Peer-to-Peer Export Guarantee (PEG): a decentralised, cluster-based prosumer market in which surplus solar is traded locally first and exported to the grid only within feeder hosting limits. The paper sets out the technical architecture and maps it onto the enabling provisions of Nigeria's Electricity Act 2023. A purposebuilt 8,760-hour techno-economic model of a 20-household cluster shows that peer-to-peer sharing combined with shared storage raises cluster self-sufficiency from 25.4% to 61.5%, cuts diesel consumption by 53.3% (≈5,365 litres and 14.4 t CO₂ per year), and recovers solar energy that the status quo wastes-at a simple payback of ≈8.6 years and a cluster levelised cost of ₦250.4/kWh, about 56% of the cost of diesel self-generation. The principal engineering challenges (reverse power flow, protection coordination, hosting capacity and the absence of a domestic interconnection standard) are identified and a phased roadmap is presented.