A former Minister of Power, Professor Chinedu Nebo said in a recent interview that he is convinced that Nigeria cannot get power sufficiency from the national grid alone but can deploy power generation to needed areas using the latest generation machines.

He said; “I have been crying from the first day that I took office as Minister of Power that Nigeria will never, I repeat never have energy or electricity supply sufficiency using the Main Grid. It cannot happen. The reason is very easily obvious – To give every part of Nigeria the transmission infrastructure that would eventually distil to distribution infrastructure needed for every community to get electricity in Nigeria will cost several trillions of naira.”

“They can take electricity to the people where they need it by what you call direct distributed power. You go to a community build a small power plant, use distribution network to do it or embedded generation. You take small engines, small generators or turbines to communities, to institutions – whether it’s agriculture or business cluster or industrial cluster, you measure the power they need and give it to them. If they grow, you increase your capacity incrementally as growth comes.”

“Industries are folding up on a regular basis and we are pointing to government, to make the government look at power generation and distribution from another angle – Embedded generation and distributed power. That is the way to go and then we need to capture renewable energy. Every part of Nigeria is amenable to renewable energy especially solar. Many parts are amenable to wind especially the coastal areas and some high wind velocity areas and a few are amenable to hydro power of different sizes. There are also even miniature hydro power plants that can be built easily with very little problem.”

Source: THIS DAY