Unstable power supply stokes underdevelopment, inflation
By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Unstable power supply adds 40 per cent to the cost of manufactured goods and services in Nigeria, a report by Nanyang Technology University Centre for African Studies shows.
Centre Director Amit Jain presented in Lagos the 150-page report titled, ‘Back to Growth: Priority Agenda for the Economic Revival of Nigeria’, where he reiterated inadequate power supply is a significant impediment to businesses in Nigeria.
The report noted the manufacturing sector has much higher productivity than agriculture and can absorb a larger proportion of the workforce, per Daily Post.
For manufacturing to be competitive, the report said economic activity should, at least to begin with, stay within the country’s comparative advantage.
It listed power cuts, transport bottlenecks, crime, and corruption among the key impediments to economic growth in Africa’s most populous nation.
“Lack of electricity adds 40 per cent to the cost of everything in Nigeria. That hurts manufacturing the most. Firms suffer from an acute shortage of power supply,” the report lamented.
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Gasification plants can end unstable power supply within 3 years, says varsity don
A university don has proposed the injection of 7,000 megawatts (mw) of electricity from 10 gasification plants in each of the 774 councils in Nigeria to ensure stable power supply across the country within three years.
The idea came from Emenike Ejiogu, a professor and engineering faculty of Dean, University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN).
Ejiogu, also the Director of Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Power and Energy Development (ACE-SPED), said Nigeria must adopt energy mix to tackle the energy crisis crippling the economy as the national grid is not sufficient.
He spoke as the 190th Inaugural Lecture of UNN, stressing 7,000 mw of electricity can be injected into each of the 774 councils through distributed energy generation.
He explained UNN gasification plant is an engineering system designed and fabricated with 100 per cent local content, which converts organic solid materials into synthetic gas for electric power generation and other uses.
His words: “The conventional power industries in Nigeria with huge generating plants, produce huge amount of power and transmit it at a long distance.
“The disadvantage of this is that you have to cover the entire country with transmission lines which would result in huge financial losses. The technical manpower is not equally there to maintain this power arrangement because most of the materials are imported.
“In this situation, the best thing to think of is distributed-generation of energy. This can be done by creating micro and mini grids across locations in Nigeria so that we can generate power and distribute locally.
“Gasification plant is one of the enabling technologies that can help you achieve this. The advantage of distributed-generation is that you can generate your power locally and manage it locally.
“When you have a lot of these micro and mini grids, you can begin to tie them together so that in the end, you will have a network.
“With this arrangement, you can infuse a huge amount of energy into our power sector without huge investment in transmission lines and other materials.
“This is an enabling technology because you can easily go into the 774 local government areas across the country and give each of them 10 megawatts of power which would result in 7,740 megawatts of power. This is already more than what our national grid is generating and transmitting.
“If the political will is there, you can infuse a huge amount of energy in our sector within a period of two to three years. It is only the gasification technology that can give you that flexibility because we would be producing fuel from waste materials and coal which are in abundance in this country.”