Egypt has taken advantage of the abundant sunshine it receives thanks to its geographic position in Africa’s largest desert while Nigeria continues to complain about desert encroachment and power outages.
The Benban Solar Park spans 36 square kilometres of desert and includes 32 individual solar projects operated by 45 different companies. When construction ends later this year, Benban will be capable of producing 1,650 megawatts of electricity, enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses.
This solar park is expected to avoid 2 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year, the equivalent of taking about 400,000 cars off the road. International Finance Corporation, advisory and asset management provider for the private sector in developing countries and a consortium of other lenders have committed $653 million to support the project.
“There are, by our estimates, 6.5 million solar panels that will be installed on this project,” Hassan Allam, chief executive officer of Hassan Allam Asset and Property Services, the facility management company overseeing the project.
There are no actual desert areas in Nigeria, but the northern part of Nigeria borders with a region known as the Sahel. Sahel in Arabic means “shore.” The 5,000 kilometer stretch of Savannah, which forms the edge of the Sahara Desert next to Nigeria, has been a problem for Nigerian government and citizens.
The Sahel stretch keeps on spreading and in future it may even occupy all of Nigeria, Mauritania and Senegal territories. The states in this region can convert this abundant sunshine into power.
It would require sustained political will to lure investments to these regions because of security concerns posed by the insurgency, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and hectares of farmland. However, Africa’s most populous nation needs cleaner sources of energy in an era of global push for low carbon future.
“Many Nigerians and Nigerian businesses that can afford other alternative energy sources have resorted to the use of electric generators at exorbitant costs. It was estimated that in 2015, manufacturers spent as much as N3.5trillion to generate alternative power due to the challenges in the supply of public electricity” Waheed Olagunju, executive director at Nigeria’s Bank of Industry said.
Nigerian governments have made efforts towards renewable forms of electricity in the country. For instance, in 2006, the Ministry of Environment implemented the Renewable Energy Master Plan (REMP), which was a strategy that aimed to increase the contribution of renewable energy to Nigeria’s total energy production by 2025.
The government’s inability to achieve its objective is largely due to a weak commitment to the proposed plans. In line with the power sector privatisation objectives, the government could consider luring private investors into the renewable energy space.
Negligence of the country’s renewable energy potential suggests that power output will remain below optimal, and this sub optimality will remain a significant constraint to economic activities in the country unless clear action is taken.
