Nigeria, Nigeria’s power situation, Job and wealth creation.
A Nigerian conundrum.
What is the role of our Nigerian government really if you can’t take good ideas and make it into everyday hunger and poverty alleviation. If it can’t mandate itself to easing off hardship and increasing internally generated revenues from the minds and efforts of the citizens.
We all know the struggle INNOSON has had, to be adapted into mainstream Nigerian private and public usage, up until recently INNOSON should have been one of the most available options for mobility in a country wanting to grow industries, factories and empowerment.
This article is for the support of local technologies, in automation, power generation, transport and waste.
One thing that comes to mind in automation is fixing our power grid, our power grid has never given 24/7 light at least not to the common man, in any part of the country.
Working at Ughelli, we knew at our oil and gas facilities that there are certain grids or Gencos generating power for the elite, in which no matter what happens, we must all do our possible best to make sure that those grids never go down because they go straight to abuja and obviously to certain elite areas in abuja.
Automation can fix our power grid to the point that power outages can be reduced to minimal, but alas, our government spends millions of dollars importing switch gears from abroad instead. Thankfully, local manufacturers like MOJEC now make meters for Nigerians, so some wins for Nigerians, MOJEC and some other companies manufacture and empower a supply chain of workers in manufacturing, designing, construction, installation and repair of electricity meters. If same was done for automated switch gears on the network, a lot of improvements can be made and value added services to maintaining the power grid can be done.
Some would argue that power generation is in deficit, to that, I would say, yes true. It’s no story Nigeria exports power to neighbouring countries, a move that may sound questionable but has some regional political necessity. For one, River Niger, flows from Futa Jalon, this is a popular geography lesson, but it means, five other west African countries share the same river. If they all had dams the size of what we have on their own part of the rivers, Nigeria might have a trickle instead of a huge river we know today.
So what’s our stance on power? Well Nigeria now has more gas powered generation than any other power generation type, we have plans to add more hydropower but we’ve spent 200 to 1000% more on some projects sized similar to those found abroad and had still not come close to project delivery. For example dams like Shiroro and Mambilla have been in the works for decades, from the inception of the ideas, to the third party finance, to project works and completion.
We also need to ramp up power available since Nigerias demand for power is ever growing, where we at least need 20,000MW to be operational. As we speak, of the close to 18,000MW installed nameplate being flaunted as our electricity capacity, only about 4,000 to 5,000MW is operational, the rest is lost or unachievable, technical and operational losses and limitations they say.
Meanwhile there are workable solutions that can come mainstream and save our future. Two things come to mind, a Hydrogen economy, and a decentralized transmission grid, which currently can only hold so much. A decentralised grid instead can save the day. Thankfully the senate is looking at state level power production, which will unlock a decentralisation that can drive innovation, create jobs and bridge the power gap. In a decentralised power grid, power is generated as close to the offtakers as possible and the excess is sent to the federal grid. In other scenarios, there can be a state grid, just how you have a federal road and a state road, so people can opt to use the state grid instead of the federal. Both scenarios can be interwoven to give even more optimisation to power generated.
With a decentralised power grid, we can then talk about, anaerobic digestion plants in Benue, or wind turbines in Gombe or Adamawa, or solar farms in northern Nigeria, or tidal and wave energy in coastal areas or coal fired power generation in the east. Waste can also see power generation with incineration power plants scattered per region. Power generation, distribution, controls, metering and customer services can create 3,000,000 jobs nationwide with a decentralised focus in view.
Waste goes to landfills or dump sites and it breaks my heart to see the good work scavengers do for so little. In more advanced countries, these scavengers are the people who sort waste in a recycling plant, manually removing re-useable items so that we can make better use of the waste through recycling. This means that thrash that actually makes it to the dump site are unrecoverable inert waste.
The waste industry can create another 2,000,000 jobs if done right, even with little automation and utilizing manual labour, automating the process can come sometime in the future, to utilize cheap Labour for the time being. How?, of course there’s a whole value chain, from truck loaders to drivers, recycle plant workers, trash bin collectors and manufacturers, other manufacturers and their plant workers, all administrative staff running multiples shifts all around the country in the waste ecosystem working to keep the country clean, 2 million jobs would be a minimalist figure.
What must our leaders do? There are lots of young people whose ideologies and innovative minds must be nurtured instead of silenced, JETS club, street level hubs and empowerment houses must be setup and taken seriously, where young innovators can get exposed to technical methodologies required to see their dream projects achieved or get necessary funding for such projects at no matter how elementary or advanced level projects they envision. The ministry of science and innovation needs to do more at creating a conducive atmosphere for youths to want to be a part of development and idea sharing, with youth parks, social platforms, competitions with mind blowing rewards that give even better incentives than Big brother. A good data base of technologies and actors can then be kept with continued memberships to such hubs, houses, social networks or parks to keep the spirit of innovation alive.
Then again I talk of a good database in a country where, there is the NIN, sim registration, drivers license, NHIS, PHCN, voters card, BVN, passport, school ID, hospital ID and many more forms of identification and it has not been unified to be able to make the country safer or drive greater value added services. Change will come.
Written by Mundez
edmundez@me.com
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#Nigeria, #PowerGeneration, #Decentralization, #RenewableEnergy, #WasteManagement, #JobCreation, #Innovation, #YouthEmpowerment, #GovernmentSupport, #EconomicDevelopment
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