mini-grids

ENGIE Energy Access has deployed a mini-grid system in Gbangba village, a rural community located in Gbako Local Government Area of Niger state. The mini-grid is a 90kWp solar hybrid system that supplies clean and reliable power to over 300 customers comprising households, small businesses, agricultural processing establishments, and other productive energy initiatives for the first time. In addition, ENGIE’s deployment of the mini-grid system will help unlock the community’s economic development potential.

Recently, ENGIE Energy Access signed performance-based grant agreements with the Rural Electrification Agency (REA) under the Nigeria Electricity Project (NEP) – a Federal Government scheme designed with the World Bank, the African Development Bank (AfDB), and other partners to provide energy access to unserved and under-served communities in Nigeria using renewable sources. The grants will enable ENGIE to deploy and scale decentralized electricity access solutions in rural Nigeria.

The company has also hinted at its ambitious plan to build another 119 mini-grids in Nigeria in the short run. This represents an excellent opportunity to bridge the electricity access gap in the country, where forty-three per cent of people live without access to energy. Indeed, Sub-Saharan Africa has the world’s lowest energy access rate, with more than half of its people unconnected to electricity.

The Gbangba mini-grid will directly impact more than 1,500 people by providing them with affordable, reliable, and clean power. The mini-grid system will also foster socio-economic prosperity in the community by enabling the development of specific economic value chains and triggering business opportunities for entrepreneurs in the village. Furthermore, the project will boost agricultural productivity in the community and improve food processing and preservation by electrifying agricultural loads such as irrigation pumping and cold storage and productive loads such as grind mills and other mechanisms. Other light industrial activities such as carpentry and welding establishments and semi-industrials such as telecom towers in the village will also be beneficiaries of ENGIE’s deployment of the mini-grid.

Recall that in 2020, the ENGIE Group consolidated Fenix International, Mobisol, and ENGIE PowerCorner to form ENGIE Energy Access. With this first deployment in Nigeria, ENGIE Energy Access has installed mini-grids in five African countries, including Benin, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia.

In addition to mini-grids, ENGIE Energy Access is active in Nigeria’s solar home systems space under the MySol brand. Recently the company celebrated a milestone of 60,000 customers with over 300,000 lives positively affected. Earlier this year, the company signed an addendum to the Output-Based Fund (OBF) Agreement under the Nigerian Electrification Project, solidifying its commitment to driving access to energy in Nigeria.

In Nigeria and Africa, solar energy is cheaper than the grid. So, solar could be our default go-to technology to resolve the energy crisis in the continent, with the paradigm of utilizing decentralized solutions to increase access to electricity and the fact that mini-grid delivers up to 99.5 per cent uptime. This represents a great opportunity for electrifying off-grid rural Nigeria with an energy access gap currently at 64 per cent. These factors highlight the need to explore this avenue in Nigeria and why ENGIE’s deployment of a mini-grid system in Niger state is a good step toward that path. But other components need to be improved, including the implementation of extant policies such as the NREEEP 2015, incentivizing the sector players and developers. Also, the government’s willingness to invest in solar power projects beyond relying on funding from development partners needs to be improved. After resolving these challenges, the scalability of solar becomes “plug and play”.