Africa needs a strategy for successful energy transition – experts

Although it has 8 percent of the global population, Africa ranks the lowest in terms of per capita electricity access hence experts are calling for a sustainable strategy to manage energy transition across the continent.

Speaking at a webinar organised by The Energy Intelligence, a Lagos based energy media consultancy, Hannah Kabir, CEO, Creeds Energy Ltd said the lack of access to energy has made businesses resort to “using backup fuel generators which are estimated at about 15 gigawatt capacity with high socioeconomic cost across households, businesses, and communities.

Echoing her, Patrick Tolani, CEO, Community Energy Social Enterprise Ltd, said, “affordability is the greatest challenge that all the industry players are faced with.

The report recently released by the National Bureau of Statistics indicates that 27.1 percent is the rate of unemployment compared with 3.9 percent in the UK meaning that about 21.7 million Nigerians are unemployed.

When such a huge number is staring us in the face and the rate of inflation is rising, what that means is that whilst the cost of delivery of the project is surging, the people’s purchasing power is reducing because they are getting into unemployment and so they are not able to buy your products.

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In the face of this, there is import duty in Solar products plus an increase in VAT on solar products presenting a dilemma. While there are lots of intervention programs, they are not supportive of each other. We need to figure out how to have inclusive development which is not the case in Nigeria today,” he noted.

In his remarks, Dayo Adeshina, Program Manager, LPG Expansion Plan, Office of the Vice President said the government has put in place several incentives to ensure the success of the LPG value chain.

According to him, “We started by looking at the 4 As: Accessibility, acceptability, availability, and affordability at the LPG Expansion program.

One of the first things we did was to look at the anomaly in the sector where LPG was the only petroleum product subjected to VAT and this had a huge impact on the price. So we had to remove that. There was also a presidential waiver on LPG equipment. We set ourselves a target of 5 million tonnes over a 10 year period.

A key aspect the government realizes is that there is a need for cylinders if you are going to have maximum penetration, especially in rural areas.

So one of the key aspects of the Expansion plan is the Cylinder Injection Scheme coupled with the stimulation of investment in cylinder manufacturing and also cylinder recertification and requalification.

Speaking on the Nuclear energy industry, Ryan Collyer, Acting CEO, Rosatom Central, and Southern Africa said the region needs to go beyond trying to give every single person access to electricity and focus on industrialization.

“In order to industrialize, we need masses of baseload power. At this point, I need to say that Africa should not only build nuclear. We have a Wind company called SC Nova Wind. We believe Nuclear with renewable is the future of the global energy industry.