The Rural Electrification Agency has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with 10 Renewable Energy Service Companies for the generation of 948MW from renewable energy.
It also signed an agreement with Oando Clean Energy to build a 1.2 gigawatt solar power plant in the country.It said the project, which would be part of the $950m Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-up project, is to stimulate local capacity for the production of solar materials in the country.Speaking at the signing ceremony on Monday in Abuja, the REA Managing Director, Abba Aliyu, stated that the project, which is funded by the World Bank and Japan International Cooperation Agency, sought to bring electricity to over 17 million Nigerians.
He said the project would include constructing an off-grid power plant, mesh electricity generation, an interconnected power grid and a solar manufacturing power plant.“The way we want to scale up the intervention, that’s the same way we want to scale up our localisation drive in solar materials. And to that end, one of the MOUs we are going to sign today is the 1,200 gigawatt PV panels assembly plant here in Nigeria. And in a few weeks, we are going to sign a joint development agreement with Infracorp and the Ministry of Finance Incorporated for another 1 gigawatt PV panels assembly plant here in Nigeria in collaboration with REA,” the DG said.
Abba also revealed that the government has approved the establishment of a N500 million Renewable Asset Management Company targeted at raising N1 trillion for intervention in the industry in the absence of loans and grants.
He said, “And to ensure the sustainability of all these interventions, the Rural Electrification Agency has secured the approval for the establishment of a Renewable Asset Management Company.“A company that will warehouse on its balance sheet all the mega assets, infrastructure that will be deployed at the universities, close to N500 million worth of assets.
“This company will warehouse these assets and will leverage on the assets to raise close to N1 trillion so that we will continue to intervene even if there is no availability of loans and grants.”With the company, he said Nigeria will be standing on its own to continue to drive electricity access and infrastructure in the next many years to come.He added, “So that ramp-up is also something that we have started, and we intend to make sure that it comes to reality before the end of the year.”He also noted that to reduce that cost of governance, we secured this N100 billion to solarize the public sector institutions.
According to him, the project will start in the next few weeks.
He announced that the agency is planning to establish the first Renewable Energy University in Africa in Abuja.The university, according to him, will be the hub of talent development in Nigeria.On his part, The President/CEO of Oando Clean Energy, Ademola Ogunbanjo, said the company would roll out the first 600-megawatt line next year to supply the local market and Africa.
“It will also be the first, on the African continent, solar modular assembly plant with a recycling line. So we’re building a solar modular assembly plant in Nigeria that will not only roll out solar panels, but also be able to take solar panels that are no longer working, maybe due to age or dysfunction, and recycle them into raw materials that we can then send back to those who use them for different purposes.”
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