Nigeria’s power woes persist as solar adoption stalls
STORY: For Shakirah Fatomide, her phone is her only source of light when one of Nigeria’s regular power outages hit.
“When there is a blackout, I get to use my phone light, so I make sure that my phone is fully charged in the office.”
Nigeria is a country beset by crises: around the economy, the cost of living, and power.
And that means solutions are in short supply.
Although Nigeria has the infrastructure to generate about 13,000 megawatts of power, its creaking grid can only distribute a third of it.
That means businesses and households are forced to run costly fuel generators.
Abba Abubakar-Aliyu heads the Rural Electrification Agency, which is responsible for expanding energy access to underserved communities.
But a sharp devaluation in the naira is taking its toll.
“Most of the equipment that we use to deploy these mini-grids are imported and that importation is a dollar-denominated importation, so quite alright it affects the cost of our projects.”
To mitigate rising costs, the agency enters agreements to domesticate solar panel manufacturing.
However, Nigeria is in the grip of its worst cost of living crisis in a generation.
Inflation has been driven up, shrinking incomes in addition to weakening the currency.
At Auxano Solar, demand for its products has fallen so much that the company has cut half of raw material imports from China.
Chuks Umezulora is the firm’s co-founder.
“Our economy generally has not been doing so well, so it means that people’s income was not growing, so the depreciation was rising faster than even people’s income and all that, so what it means is that a lot of Nigerians’ disposable income shrank.”
Umezulora added that the situation may improve if banks become more open to financing solar systems.
But for now, many Nigerians like Shakirah will need to keep their phones charged – or face doing their daily tasks in the dark.
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