Aso Rock to disconnect from national grid by March 2026
The Aso Rock Presidential Villa is set to fully disconnect from the national electricity grid by March 2026 following the completion of its solar power project, the State House Permanent Secretary, Temitope Fashedemi, has said.
Fashedemi disclosed this on Wednesday while defending the State House 2026 budget before the Senate Committee on Special Duties at the National Assembly in Abuja.
According to him, the solar installation was completed toward the end of 2025 and has been undergoing testing since December.
“We are hopeful that maybe by March we will be able to do a full cutover,” he told lawmakers, adding that the transition would result in significant cost savings for the Federal Government.
The permanent secretary cited the State House Medical Centre as evidence of the project’s viability, noting that the facility has been running entirely on solar power since May 2025.
“Since that time, the generator in the State House Medical Centre has not been put on for one minute,” he said. “Only a couple of months, we used three per cent from AEDC, while the rest has come strictly from solar and battery storage.”
The Federal Government allocated N10bn in the 2025 budget for the solarisation of the Presidential Villa through a solar mini grid project. An additional N7bn was included in the 2026 Appropriation Bill.
The project, however, attracted criticism from Nigerians who argued that installing solar power at Aso Rock amounted to an admission that the government had failed to fix the country’s unstable electricity supply.
In response, the Director General of the Energy Commission of Nigeria, Mustapha Abdullahi, had defended the initiative in April 2025, describing it as unsustainable for the Villa to continue paying an estimated N47bn annually in electricity bills.
Before the solar transition, the Presidential Villa owed nearly N1bn in electricity debts. In February 2024, the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company listed the Villa among top government debtors with an outstanding bill of N923.87m, later reviewed to N342.35m after reconciliation and settled on the directive of President Bola Tinubu.
Fashedemi told senators that the testing phase of the solar project revealed cases of overbilling by AEDC, including charges for electricity not supplied.
“What we discovered during testing is that some transformers were billing for power that was not delivered,” he said, adding that discussions were ongoing to reconcile the legacy liabilities.
He also expressed optimism that the Villa’s ageing generators would no longer be required once the solar system becomes fully operational, except for limited backup use.
Meanwhile, the committee chairman, Senator Kaka Lawan, criticised the N127m provision for SUV vehicles in the State House budget, describing it as inadequate.
“It cannot buy even a bulletproof tokunbo,” Lawan said, directing the Budget Office of the Federation to review the allocation upward.
He commended the State House for appearing before the committee as scheduled, describing the move as a positive example for other ministries and agencies.
