I am driven to continue with the series on how stupid we seem to be in Nigeria because of the current 40% in electricity tarriff. I saw one comparison of electricity costs in Cape Town (South Africa's most expensive area) and Ojuelegba Lagos. The poor man living in a one room face to face pays more than the rich of Cape Town for electricity.

Now I bring to you three stories, one of a German village of about 160 homes which generates electricity, the other village generates and sells, and the second is the day peopl were paid to use electricity in Texas. Yes, that is real.

This small German village called Wildpoldsried produces its own power, produces 5x more than it needs, and sells the remaining making $7m annually from selling excess electricity. At the moment, Wildpoldsried has a wide variety of renewable energy facilities, including 11 wind turbines that have a capacity of about 12 MW, solar photovoltaics with a 4,900 kWp capacity, that are mostly mounted on private homes, along with five biogas plants, three hydro power plants, and a solar thermal system. What’s even more admirable, many projects were financed by the town’s residents themselves, with a small help from the Bavarian Government.

The second village called Feldheim has a population of 160. Yes, 160. They contributed 3000 - 4000 Euros each (about N1million each before Naira broke), and today they are totally off-grid. They make their own power! The wind farm now has 47 turbines, which produce 175 million kilowatt hours of electricity every year. The town of Feldheim uses just one per cent of that, the rest is sold back into the wider grid. Residents and businesses now pay a third less for their electricity than other German communities, at 16.5 eurocents per kilowatt hour.

Sometimes in 2015, a very strange thing happened: The so-called spot price of electricity in Texas fell toward zero, hit zero, and then went negative for several hours. As the Lone Star State slumbered, power producers were paying the state’s electricity system to take electricity off their hands. At one point, the negative price was $8.52 per megawatt hour. There have been 84 records of such instances as at 2015, imagine you getting paid for using electricity.

But why are we always getting things wrong? They tell us we pay more for running generators, it is only a core fool that will compare generators with public utility and use cost of running generators as a model for pricing electricity. And it is only in Nigeria you see such reasoning.

Yn

Why is it so difficult to replicate this here?e no fit b spiritual o because our prayer vault for heaven don full

CPriest:
I am driven to continue with the series on how stupid we seem to be in Nigeria because of the current 40% in electricity tarriff. I saw one comparison of electricity costs in Cape Town (South Africa's most expensive area) and Ojuelegba Lagos. The poor man living in a one room face to face pays more than the rich of Cape Town for electricity.

Now I bring to you three stories, one of a German village of about 160 homes which generates electricity, the other village generates and sells, and the second is the day peopl were paid to use electricity in Texas. Yes, that is real.

This small German village called Wildpoldsried produces its own power, produces 5x more than it needs, and sells the remaining making $7m annually from selling excess electricity. At the moment, Wildpoldsried has a wide variety of renewable energy facilities, including 11 wind turbines that have a capacity of about 12 MW, solar photovoltaics with a 4,900 kWp capacity, that are mostly mounted on private homes, along with five biogas plants, three hydro power plants, and a solar thermal system. What’s even more admirable, many projects were financed by the town’s residents themselves, with a small help from the Bavarian Government.

The second village called Feldheim has a population of 160. Yes, 160. They contributed 3000 - 4000 Euros each (about N1million each before Naira broke), and today they are totally off-grid. They make their own power! The wind farm now has 47 turbines, which produce 175 million kilowatt hours of electricity every year. The town of Feldheim uses just one per cent of that, the rest is sold back into the wider grid. Residents and businesses now pay a third less for their electricity than other German communities, at 16.5 eurocents per kilowatt hour.

Sometimes in 2015, a very strange thing happened: The so-called spot price of electricity in Texas fell toward zero, hit zero, and then went negative for several hours. As the Lone Star State slumbered, power producers were paying the state’s electricity system to take electricity off their hands. At one point, the negative price was $8.52 per megawatt hour. There have been 84 records of such instances as at 2015, imagine you getting paid for using electricity.

But why are we always getting things wrong? They tell us we pay more for running generators, it is only a core fool that will compare generators with public utility and use cost of running generators as a model for pricing electricity. And it is only in Nigeria you see such reasoning.

what do you think can be done to change this?

Brunel:

what do you think can be done to change this?

Your interest (I guess that's why you asked the question) is appreciated. Looking at the two cases they are community driven projects. Before now, I still wonder why universities in Nigeria should still be in darkness or burn diesel like it is oxygen. University communities are a good fit for smaller versions of this project. High profile estates are also fit for such.

The technical side - the expertise to make something like this happen is a major challenge. I am not saying it is impossible to find people here who can design and build electricity generation projects but such will be scarce. In my opinion, getting the funding required is not as hard as getting experienced people to plan and build it.

CPriest:


Your interest (I guess that's why you asked the question) is appreciated. Looking at the two cases they are community driven projects. Before now, I still wonder why universities in Nigeria should still be in darkness or burn diesel like it is oxygen. University communities are a good fit for smaller versions of this project. High profile estates are also fit for such.

The technical side - the expertise to make something like this happen is a major challenge. I am not saying it is impossible to find people here who can design and build electricity generation projects but such will be scarce. In my opinion, getting the funding required is not as hard as getting experienced people to plan and build it.

You're completely right about the availability of technical manpower. Renewable energy systems interest me because almost everything depend on it.
Nigeria has so much potential in this field that it baffles me we are not utilising it, more surprising is the fact that there is no stable power and many businesses and communities rely on fuel burning to generate electricity when an alternative source is just an elbow stretch away.
I hope to fill this technical lacuna sometime soon. I'm currently taking a course on renewable energy systems.

very correct

So true because based on what l have experienced regarding biogas, l know with about N8m, a village of 100 homes that had never beem connected to the national grid can have access to power for lightning and charging of phones from 6p.m to 6a.m daily.

Brunel:

You're completely right about the availability of technical manpower. Renewable energy systems interest me because almost everything depend on it.
Nigeria has so much potential in this field that it baffles me we are not utilising it, more surprising is the fact that there is no stable power and many businesses and communities rely on fuel burning to generate electricity when an alternative source is just an elbow stretch away.
I hope to fill this technical lacuna sometime soon. I'm currently taking a course on renewable energy systems.

That's a good one, wish you the best in it. Hope you contribute to the solutions we need.

I think it's all because of our over dependent on government..like @cpriest said earlier our universities should be the edge pioneers of this type of projects but alas what they are all after is money! I think if we and our communities start to help ourselves it would be easier for the government to help us.

OK