Lagos names board, management team for new power market operator

The Lagos State Government has appointed the founding board and management team of the Lagos State Independent System Operator, a newly created body tasked with running the commercial and technical machinery of Nigeria’s most commercially active state electricity market.

The appointments, announced Tuesday, follow the enactment of the Lagos State Electricity Law in 2024, which gave the state authority to operate its own electricity market independent of the national grid framework. Lagos becomes the first Nigerian state to establish a dedicated independent system operator, a structure common in deregulated electricity markets from Texas to the United Kingdom.

Biodun Ogunleye will chair the Governing Board, with Lanre Fagbohun as vice chairman. Additional board members include Abayomi Oluyomi, engineers Ibilola Kasunmu and Muktaar Tijani, and Oladimeji-Yisa Taiwo, who holds the dual role of board member and Managing Director.

The management trio running day-to-day operations brings combined experience spanning decades across power transmission, legal practice, and financial regulation. Taiwo, who will serve as Managing Director, spent more than three decades at institutions including the Central Bank of Nigeria, cutting across financial systems regulation and public policy.

Adetunji Bashiru Adesanya, designated System Operator, carries over 35 years in transmission operations and grid management. Bunmi Benson, the Market Operator, comes from a background in regulatory compliance and commercial transactions across the energy and financial sectors.

Together, the team will oversee grid coordination, electricity market settlements, and compliance with the technical and commercial rules governing the Lagos market — functions that in the national system are fragmented across the Transmission Company of Nigeria and the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission.

The scale of the task ahead is considerable. Lagos accounts for roughly a third of Nigeria’s electricity consumption but has long suffered from the same supply failures that have pushed businesses across the country toward diesel self-generation. With its own system operator now in place, the state government is positioning LAISO as the institutional backbone for an electricity market designed to attract private investment and reduce dependence on an unreliable national grid.

Under the Lagos State Electricity Law, LAISO will also convene a Member Sector Group Committee — a stakeholder body representing generators, distribution companies, embedded power producers, grid-tied industrial customers, and end-users. The committee is intended to give market participants a formal channel into grid and market governance decisions, a structure that energy policy specialists say is essential for building investor confidence in an emerging electricity market.

Lagos has moved deliberately toward establishing independent energy infrastructure since a 2023 constitutional amendment granted sub-national governments authority to generate, transmit, and distribute electricity. The state has since issued licenses to private distribution and generation firms, and officials have framed the electricity sector as a pillar of a broader economic development push.

The LAISO appointments draw the governance framework closer to completion, though the harder work of operating wholesale electricity markets and maintaining system reliability in a city of more than 20 million people still lies ahead. The state government called on market participants to cooperate with the new leadership as it works to bring the Lagos market into full operation.