Self-Generation and Households’ Willingness to Pay for Reliable Electricity Service in Nigeria

Many households in developing countries often engage in self-generation to mitigate the impacts of poor public electricity provision. What is less well known, however, is whether (and how) self-generation influences households’ willingness to pay (WTP) for service reliability. Using data collected from a sample of Nigerian households, the results reveal that engagement in self-generation is positively correlated with WTP for reliability. This is despite the fact that self-generation reduces the negative welfare impact of unreliability. Further analyses, however, show that backup households’ decisions to pay a higher amount than non-backup households are influenced by the costs of self-generation: an increase of N1 (US$0.006) in self-generation’s fuel cost per-hour is associated with WTP about N5.22 (US$0.032) more in the monthly bill. However, households’ WTP US$0.15–0.16/kWh of improved reliability is smaller than the marginal costs of reliability from self-generation—US$0.27–0.41/kWh.We conclude by discussing the policy implications of our findings.