Exorbitant electricity bills never stop coming, yet lengthy power cuts dog 57-year-old Blessing Martin’s shop where she sells soft drinks in Ikorodu, a border town north of Nigeria’s economic nerve centre, Lagos.
In search of alternatives, most experts believe Nigeria has the economic war chest and environmental conditions to tap into renewable energy power sources which is far quicker than traditional power plants and has proven capability to plug the gaps in Nigeria’s energy requirements.
“Full utilization of Nigeria’s renewable energy sector has the capacity to bridge the energy gap through projects that are viable for all parties involved,” the managing director of clean energy technology producer, WATT Renewable, Oluwole Eweje said in a chat with BusinessDay.
According to Eweje, “Nigeria’s renewable energy sources could be utilized in the following regions, wind (East), solar (everywhere), bio-mass (everywhere), tidal (South East), geo-thermal (East), and wave power (anywhere along the coast line)”.
Although solar appliances are relatively more expensive than generating sets, the cost pales when compared with the cost of powering, servicing, fuelling and maintaining generating sets.
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“Nigeria’s energy poverty is experienced by a large portion of the population, however the population itself that is interested in accessing energy has figured out a way to fill their need via diesel generators,” Eweje noted.
In Nigeria, households and businesses have resorted to fossil-fuelled generators that gulp about $14 billion annually and pose environmental and health risks.
Estimates by the World Bank suggest that investing in solar-powered plants could increase the availability of electricity to almost 80 million people who currently have none.
This means a transition to solar-based energy could help diversify Nigeria’s energy portfolio and reduce high electricity bills, as was the case for Blessing Martins. Such transition could also stop the reliance on fossil fuels which come with attendant challenges like pollution through flaring and spillage.
Like Martin’s experience, solar-powered appliances could also be a good alternative to generating sets without cost and health risks that come with the latter.
Nigeria’s power generation capacity, which consists of gas-fired and hydro-powered stations, is about 13,000 Megawatts, but the electricity transmitted remains less than 4,000MW/hour.
This is unlike South Africa, a country with less than a third of Nigeria’s population, which has an installed electricity capacity that is four times more than Nigeria’s, according to the U.S. Power Africa programme.
Again, South Africa’s per capita energy consumption is 31 times higher than Nigeria’s, even though the southern African nation is Africa’s second-largest economy.
Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, loses an estimated $29 billion a year due to this, which is about six per cent of the GDP, according to the International Monetary Fund.
