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SUPPLY PROCUREMENT and the electricity utility lack the capital to
invest in the transmission and distribution
Nigeria to fix irregular CPCS designs Sub- infrastructure needed to effectively deliver
power to all of the population.
power supply in 40 years Saharan Africa’s largest Mozambique has committed to achieve
As a rapidly developing country,
The Nigerian Senate has said that it will take solar and battery storage universal access to electricity by 2030. After
Nigeria 40 years to fix irregular power supply. successful implementation in Uganda, and
This was disclosed by the Senate procurement programme with a second ongoing program in Zambia,
Committee on Power on Tuesday after the Mozambique is next to benefit from GET
Minister of Power and his team made a CPCS, a global management consulting firm FiT. The programme will deliver universal
presentation to the Committee, the local in the infrastructure sector, has helped to access to electricity through renewable energy,
newspaper Guardian reported. bring a combination of technical, financial battery storage and other decentralised
The four decades wait, according to the and public-private partnership knowledge solutions.
lawmakers, is due to underfunding and in order to develop an innovative solution “GET FiT is a toolbox of support options”
the Federal Government’s failure to fix the for Mozambique, which is aiming to secure said Robert Graham, CPCS’s Global Director,
challenges of electricity generation. universal access to electricity by 2030 through Power Advisory. “Our role was to craft a plan
The committee was astonished by solar power and battery energy storage. to best adapt these tools to Mozambique’s
the submission of the Minister of Power, The Global Energy Transfer Feed in unique needs and context and achieve stated
Mamman Saleh, that of the N165billion Tariff (GET FiT) Programme alleviates grid objectives.”
required for capital projects in 2020, N4billion constraints by addressing energy demands Doing so requires deep knowledge of the
was given as bribe of which only N3billion in Mozambique and providing energy to country’s economic, financial and political
was cash-backed. cities that need it the most. Developed by the realities. Equally important is the technical
In lieu of this, the Committee dismissed German development bank kfW, GET FiT aspect of the programme. While GET FiT
claims made by the minister over raising hope provides tools to help emerging economies promotes renewable energy projects, it does
on early provision of constant power supply, develop small-scale renewable energy not specify which technologies to use and
while Managing Director of the Transmission projects. Provisions such as technical and how to adapt the tools to the local context.
Company of Nigeria (TCN), Sule Ahmed funding assistance and risk mitigation make The challenge, then, was to determine the
Abdulaziz, painted a gloomy picture during projects part of this programme attractive to support tools as well as the renewable energy
the ministry’s budget defense. investors. technology that best addresses energy needs
A member of the Committee, Danjuma Mozambique’s generation potential of in Mozambique.
Goje, expressed concern that based on 187 gigawatts is greater than Africa’s entire CPCS experts concluded that combining
Abdulaziz’s presentation, N165billion was electricity production. It is virtually Southern solar power and large-scale batteries was the
proposed, but the ministry gave N4billion Africa’s power generator. Yet, despite being best way to energise Mozambican cities and
in envelope, insisting that it would take 41 a net exporter of power, only 29 per cent villages. This was not a routine assessment,
years to deliver constant electricity when of Mozambique’s population has access because pairing solar power with battery
N165billion is divided by N4billion. to electricity. This is because the country procurement of such a scale had never been

Week 43 29•October•2020 www. NEWSBASE .com P9