Critical Infrastructure Resilience, Climate Stress, and Cascading Failures in Nigeria’s Electricity Grid: A Spatial Systems Analysis

Nigeria's electricity grid, spanning transmission infrastructure across all six geopolitical zones, is concurrently challenged by structural underinvestment, technical fragility, and escalating climate stressors including flood inundation of substations, extreme heat loading on transmission lines, and drought-induced hydropower generation shortfalls that interact to produce cascading failure dynamics not yet rigorously analysed within a spatial systems framework. This study develops and applies a spatial systems analysis framework for critical infrastructure resilience assessment applied to Nigeria's national electricity grid under current and projected climate stress conditions. The theoretical framework integrates critical infrastructure systems theory, network resilience analysis, and climate risk assessment, conceptualising grid resilience as a spatially variable function of network topology, component vulnerability, and adaptive governance capacity. Empirical data include national grid topology network data from the Transmission Company of Nigeria, historical outage records from the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (2015 to 2023), climate exposure data from satellite and model outputs, and flood inundation maps for transmission infrastructure corridors. Network analysis metrics including betweenness centrality, clustering coefficient, and algebraic connectivity were computed for the grid topology graph to identify structurally critical nodes. Climate exposure-weighted fragility indices were assigned to nodes and edges based on proximity to flood zones, temperature exceedance frequency, and drought-hydropower sensitivity. Monte Carlo simulation of failure propagation under random and targeted attack scenarios tested cascading failure dynamics under current and climate-stressed grid conditions. Results identify 23 critical transmission nodes where simultaneous failure would produce grid-wide blackout probability exceeding 70 percent, with 14 of these nodes classified as highly climate-exposed. The study provides the first spatially explicit climate-grid resilience assessment for Nigeria. Keywords: infrastructure resilience, electricity grid, climate risk, spatial systems analysis, Nigeria.