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THE transparency that the Minister of Power, Works and Housing provided in the Q&A session on the electricity industry published in Vanguard newspaper is commendable. There was a time when things happened and no one knew why or why not. We truly live in a new Nigeria.

The candour shown is also worthy of commendation. Unfortunately, as I read the article I could not help but share my thoughts on some of the responses and hope to contribute my voice to this conversation, one that has never really happened regarding the moribund state of the power industry in Nigeria.

I write this from a place of hope and a desire to see things change for my family and the millions of Nigerians who have gone from a world where there was power to one where people go weeks without a blink of electricity. There are complaints from the populace but I choose to believe that these complaints come from a place that recognizes that once the power issue is solved there is no way but up for Nigeria. This is how critical power is, it drives the economy.

Critical  power

There are three main issues to focus on here.  The future of the utility will be distributed and not centralized: The utility industry is made up of three layers. The infrastructure layer (generation plants, wires and lines, transformers, meters), a technology layer (the software that runs the operations of all the infrastructure and customer interactions) and the customer layer (metering, billing and payments).

Every one of those layers used to operate on the premise that there was generation in a location that is far from the customer and the power is then transmitted to the consumer. In the future of the industry, one that was not mentioned in the Ministers response, generation of electricity will be closer to the location of the consumer.

The future of the utility industry is already playing out in countries across the world in the form of incentives provided to consumers to purchase solar panels and geothermal generation at a cost that makes it lower than the cost of power obtained from the grid.

Unfortunately this means that the customer is the one who enjoys the benefit and obviously (a point the Minister kept making) the DISCOs are left holding on to assets that are not as valuable as they thought they were when they got into this business of privatizing the Nigerian power market. The tariff increases compensate the DISCOs for a business model of the past when the government (and customers money) should go into building the utility industry of the future. Embracing solar generation and providing rebates and incentives to consumers will enable Nigeria meet the shortfall in power generation quicker than we would by building huge plants in remote locations to help the DISCOs.

Building those solar panels in Nigeria, since we will not be reinventing the wheel on a manufacturing process that is relatively straightforward, would create thousands of technical jobs and consequently improving the lives of thousands of Nigerians creating a cycle of jobs-income-spending and a boost to the economy. The part of the Ministers response that mentioned this future reality spoke about the high cost of solar and I address this in point 2 below.

Technology prices will surely drop once mass adoption takes place: The Minister talked about Solar prices being higher than the current price of electricity (N34/kWh for solar compared to tariff of N24) and I will suggest that there is no technology where this has not been the case in the early days of introducing the technology to the market. I will use an example that is familiar to almost every Nigerian; the mobile phone. When I was growing up in Nigeria in the 80’s landline telephones were for the few and the management of those phones were centralized (similar to the centralized nature of the power industry of today). In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s when mobile phones started getting into the market it was still for the educated and slightly well off.

That is the reality of most technologies; they are expensive at the beginning and as time goes on they become affordable to the masses. This will be the case with solar energy if we realize that it has a big role to play in the future of the power sector in this country. The price of solar will drop in the same way the price of mobile phones dropped and even right now with $20M we can supply 5000 homes with power from solar for (at least) 10 years. Considering the money we are recovering from our past ‘leaders’ this is a small price to pay to start to head in the direction we need to go.

That future is already here and the cost will be less than fixing the mistakes of the past: Driving through Lagos and even some of the most remote locations in Nigeria what we see is generators managed by businesses and individuals who can afford them and small generators and even smaller lamps being run by individuals who have a need for power to run their lives. This is the future that we are talking about; one where power generation and management is done at the individual level.

Again, this is not something that is hard to envision because it is already here and it takes away the need to buy or replace infrastructure that is best suited for the past and instead focusing on adopting technology that serves our future needs.

Infrastructure  as the transition

So what is the role of the DISCOs you ask? Their role will be whatever they decide they want it to be. There will still be a need to provide infrastructure as the transition will take time and there will always be a need for some level of centralization even in a localized and distributed grid, the DISCOs can do this.

The real question the Minister should be helping the DISCOs answer is what role do they want to play in serving a country of consumers that are yearning for a world where the naturally abundant sources of energy that they can use is not being provided to them? Customers will always want electricity and, as technology improves and the situation continues to get worse, what customers will ask is ‘who can give us power?’ The role of the government should be to help customers answer that question instead of trying to help a soon to be obsolete business model to survive against the tide of change. It is what consumers and technology wants.

• Taiwo Adedoyin is a Co- Founder-Publisher   of Business in Africa Magazine