Prof. Ejiogu who is also the Director, Africa Centre of
Excellence for Sustainable Power and Energy Development, ACE-SPED, further said
that Nigeria must adopt energy mix in order to stave off energy crisis
crippling the economy, adding that the
conventional national grid has proven to be insufficient in meeting the
country’s energy needs.
He spoke as the 190th Inaugural Lecture of the University of
Nigeria at the Princess Alexandra Auditorium, UNN, adding that through
gasification plant, 10,000 megawatts of electricity can be injected into all
the 774 local government areas in Nigeria through distributed energy
generation.
While presenting the topic of the lecture titled ‘My
Engineering Odyssey: Energy Security, Energy Sustainability and Bringing Power
to the People,’ he explained that the gasification plant is an engineering
system which is designed and fabricated locally with 100% local content, and
which converts organic solid materials into synthetic gas for electric power
generation and other uses.
“The conventional power industries in Nigeria with huge
generating plants, produce huge amount of power and transmit it at a long
distance. The disadvantage of this is that you have to cover the entire country
with transmission lines which would result in huge financial losses. The
technical manpower is not equally there
to maintain this power arrangement because most of the materials are imported.
“In this situation, the best thing to think of is
distributed-generation of energy. This can be done by creating micro and mini
grids across locations in Nigeria so that we can generate power and distribute
locally. Gasification plant is one of the enabling technologies that can help
you achieve this. The advantage of distributed-generation is that you can
generate your power locally and manage it locally.
“When you have a lot of these micro and mini grids, you can
begin to tie them together so that in the end, you will have a network. With
this arrangement, you can infuse huge amount of energy into our power sector
without huge investment in transmission lines and other materials. This is an
enabling technology because you can easily go into the 774 local government
areas across the country and give each of them 10 megawatts of power which
would result to 7,740 megawatts of power. This is already more than what our
national grid is generating and transmitting. If the political will is there,
you can infuse huge amount of energy in our sector within a period of two to
three years. It is only the gasification technology that can give you that
flexibility because we would be producing fuel from waste materials and coal
which are in abundance in this country,” he explained.
He also said “With the current epileptic power supply in the
country occasioned by the frequent collapse of the national grid, this is time
to give proper attention to alternative power source.
“Our designed gasification plant converts solid wastes into
gas, just like the refineries which turns crude oil into petrol and other
products. What we need is the fund to mass produce it.
“Organizations can comfortably depend and run on it, what is
required is to change the already existing diesel generators and modify them to
run on gas and it will serve as mini-grid.
“Depending on public power supply alone has negatively
impacted on production outputs and services of organisations in Nigeria, which
as well have affected the national economy because some organisation can no
longer operate under the epileptic power supply with price of diesel always on
a high side,” he said.
In his address, the Vice Chancellor of UNN, Prof. Charles
Igwe, who was also the chairman of the occasion, said that Nigerian
universities cannot really be autonomous if the managements can produce
services which would make them self-sustaining.
He described Prof. Ejiogu’s lecture as germane, especially
as the country is still grappling with epileptic power supply, adding that
keying into the lecturer’s alternative power generation would save Nigeria some
cost of running only on the conventional power.