Data based investigation of the energy metering type, billing and usage of sampled residents of Ota Community in Nigeria

Accurate energy metering and billing is a challenge in some developing countries. In Nigeria, the issues of inadequate power generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure are recurrent problems, coupled with inefficient energy metering which is a major problem that results in residential energy consumers being billed unfair energy charges by the Electricity Distribution Companies (DISCOs) for unused energy, and this has been termed “crazy bill”. For the energy sector to be effective, energy bills should be based on the actual energy usage and likewise customers must pay for used energy. To achieve this, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) recommended the installation of prepaid meters for all customers, but as at today, there is no full compliance with this regulation. Power supply is grossly unreliable, and this has affected power quality due to frequent load shedding and power outages. The dataset presented in this article captures the type of apartment, the type of electrical appliances used by occupant, the average monthly energy bill paid for electricity, the use or non-use of alternative energy sources, the type of alternative energy sources used, and the type of energy meter used by sampled residents of the Ota community in Ogun State, Nigeria. The dataset was acquired using an investigative questionnaire to survey the residential consumers within the sampled space.