The popular nursery rhyme reverberates…


“Some like it hot

Some like it cold

Some like it in the pot nine days old”.


In Nigeria we just like to own it. We have to own our borehole and pumping machine to be able to have running water. We have to own our own security outfit to provide security. We own our own neighborhood development to take care of the trash and road. And to generate power, we own our own diesel, petrol or kerosene generators. If we can’t afford either, we go to the bush and harvest wood to burn our own fires. That is the psyche of our people. The telecommunications revolution tapped into this and we grew from 250,000 lines to over 45 million active cell phones within a decade. A cell phone is something we can own. Something we call our own. No one can contest this ownership with us. It is part of us. It is part of our identity.



To solve the electricity problem, we have to carter to this need to own. Historically, heavily centralized services have not worked for Nigeria. From the government to telecommunications to water supply. What has proved effective and efficient is local service; a strategically placed water borehole serving a few streets in the city, a telecommunications mast serving all cell phones in a small area, a personal power generator providing power for a home or a small block of apartment buildings. These are the infrastructure we are used to. These are what we know works. These small, efficient machines or installations that we can see, touch and understand are the things we trust will work for us. We do not trust central infrastructure – you only need to drive down Benin –Ore road to realize the wisdom of staying local. And the average Nigerian learns to live with it and not trust that it would change.



This lack of trust is not necessarily a bad thing. Luckily, technology is making ownership of personal generators a lot cheaper and smarter. The burden of not having good infrastructure in Nigeria can be turned to an advantage in today’s world. We would totally leapfrog the infrastructure deficit of the past and move to a future where everything we could ever need would fit into our pockets just like the cell phone. For power generation, we cannot exactly carry a fire in our pocket – if you discount the flashlights on cell phones that is – but we can put that generator on the roofs of our homes.



Increasingly, cost of solar photovoltaic cells (PV) has been reducing exponentially. It is calculated that the cost of PV reduces by 7 percent every year. From $13/watt in 1980, it is $1.67/watt today and will be about $0.5/watt in 2030. (see graph). What this means for us in Nigeria is instead of using I pass my neighbor petrol generator, a solar generator could serve the same purpose, generate 500 watt of power at a cost of N5, 000 per year, by 2030 this cost will reduce to N1,500/yr in today’s naira. This however does not include the cost of inverter (if we could use only direct current devices, there will be no need for an inverter) and batteries for power storage to be used at night.



This is the great opportunity we could exploit today to assure every Nigerian access to clean affordable electricity supply. The adoption of wide scale roof top or floor mounted PV cells could open up entrepreneurship opportunities, jobs in solar PV manufacturing, scientific breakthroughs in research, new industries and products that are direct current (DC) based instead of alternating current (AC) based. It will grant us an opportunity to do something radically new and different and in this way enable us solve the electricity problem and create wealth while doing so.

* This article was originally published in Nigerian TELL Magazine Online

Financing Green Energy Growth

I grew up as one of the lucky 250,000 Nigerians that had a NITEL land line before the advent of GSM and cell phones in Nigeria. Today, everyone who can put N2,000 together can get a line and a cell phone.

The Obasanjo administration deregulated the telecommunications industry and Nigeria is now awash with telecommunication companies, a booming industry and happy citizens who can now 'complain' about poor service. We need to achieve the same growth and liberalization for the energy sector, particularly electricity. It appears that anything that can be 'pay-as-you-go' would scale in Nigeria.

To translate this to electricity and clean electricity at that; we can achieve scale with the right government policy. A first step would be to allow anyone to generate and sell electricity as long as the source of generation is 'clean'. This way we could have neighbourhood estates and villages generating solar power (using concentrated solar panel technology) or wind power to produce energy at source with minimal transmission losses and plant maintenance costs.

A second step and one that could create huge demand and a new industry would be the creating of a legislation that would treat green energy home improvements as a mortgage. If there is a government policy is instituted that would allow citizens or businesses that install solar generation or wind generation systems to get tax credits at a better rate than current mortgage tax credit, we would immediately unlock bank funds and harvest the low hanging fruits of rich people who currently use N2-N3M silent generators. By providing financing and tax credits, these customers will be the early adopters of the technology on a large scale and progressively wean us off fossil fuel generating sets.

It will like the mobile phone business create new companies, jobs, innovations, businesses and added services that we do not have now because electricity does not exist. The cost for early adopters will be high but as the technology and services become more available, we will naturally follow Moore's law; the same way mobile phones followed Moore's law, service and phones became twice better but cost twice cheaper every 18-24 months.

If we can make it relatively 'painless' for early adopters to afford green energy in Nigeria, then we will be well positioned to leapfrog to the new 'green' energy world and bring on board virtually all Nigerians to reliable, available energy in the next 10 years, the same way the mobile phone industry has provided communication to virtually all Nigerians within the same time frame.