By Olamide Francis
Nigeria is endowed with abundant energy resources, both conventional and renewable, which can potentially provide the country with a sufficient capacity to meet the ambitions of both urban and rural Nigerians of a full, nationwide electrification level.
Yet, Nigeria has one of the lowest consumption rates of electricity per capita in Africa. With the demand superseding the generation, there is inequitable access of rural communities to the electricity service in the country. There are inherent obstacles militating against the effective implementation of an orderly energy policy in Nigeria.
The inefficiencies overshadowing the allocation of energy resources coupled with the near depletion of fossil fuels, make it imperative for the country to exploit its huge natural renewable resources to avoid a worsening energy supply scenario and provide feasible electricity to rural dwellers.
A renewable energy expert, Mr. Ukah Ibe, says Nigeria has good renewable energy policies but more efforts are needed for policy implementation to harness the sector.
Ibe, the chief executive officer of Nexgen Energy, stated this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria on the prospect of the renewable energy industry in 2021.
He said that Nigeria had the right policy framework and the technology required to harness renewable energy sources and improve the economy of the country.
“We need to know where we are presently to know where we are going; Nigeria is part of a global village in terms of solar development.
“In technology, we are just like every other country too because whatever happens in any country in terms of technology, we can also have access to it because the world is now a global village. In policymaking, we were signatory to the Paris Climate Change Agreement and some of the policies for most countries are derived from that Paris Agreement on climate change.
“In terms of deployment, we may not be as other countries because Nigeria is one of the developing nations; so the effect of capital obviously will be there because most of the infrastructural development is not like other countries and we don’t have access to capital such as other countries do.
“But in policymaking and technology, we are just like other countries only that we have yet to get there in deployment,” he said.
Ibe said that the government focus basically now should be on the implementation of already existing policies, noting while some policies had yielded results, more still need to be done to increase deployment of renewable energy in Nigeria.
“Besides, just having the policies implementation is also critical. Policy implementation such as funding from development partners and the federal government is already in place,” he said.
The renewable energy expert said that the power sector had been privatised through government policies “and we are seeing the effect.
“Though now the grid sector is having challenges of capital liquidity, they have a lot of cash flow issues due to collections and technical losses and all that but the policy is there; just how to implement the policies and create efficiency in the system”.
