Untitled episode

where I'm living there is no electricity imagine the place that you don't have light you are just still remain in that darkness in the night it's only your phone you use it for the touch light no light in the house Vos is Africa's biggest city with about 25 million people people get outages that can last 12 hours a day for sometimes we can stay for 2

weeks no Supply sometimes 3 weeks they can only bring the light 10 minutes 15 minutes the price of petrol of the main source of fuel increased almost threefold and so now people and increasingly are thinking about Alternatives and that's where the solar industry is hoping it can tap and [Music] opportunity as a result of the great issues in Lagos and Nigeria most people rely on generators

even in markets you'll hear just the noises of generators it's really loud uh their engines running you would also smell often the smell of f it's unusual in that a lot of people provide their own power because the city only gets about 1,000 megaw of energy compared to a similar City like Shanghai that has about 30 times more power for the same amount of people for

years fueling the generator has been very cheap Nigeria is an oil rich country that's had fuel subsidies in case for a very long time but on the 29th of May 2023 things would all change that was the inauguration day of President Bola tinubu as the new president of Nigeria the first is gone immediately the price of fuel changed for the average Nigerian it had a very

direct impact from one day to the next the cost of commuting to the office was more expensive it also affected generator usage solar entrepreneurs adjusted their targets after the fuel subsidy because they were finally more competitive with fossil fuel energy we spoke to a company called Energy which actually is now bringing a new product into the market that will address Mass Market customers where it had

previously provided solo solutions to high in income earners these are what energy uh blue boxes look like this is the 5.4 kwh battery system it's a lot more affordable but we've seen a lot more of such customers that after they've tried the system are to run their business and they've seen savings some of them come back for a full uh system petrol had been friendlier to

their pocket than solar that's why I mean we saw a lot of Nigerians not really pushing to switch but now given that foil pricing it's close to being cost reflective Bloomberg new energy Finance where analysts there are projecting that solar energy output would increase from 1 gaw for Nigeria in 2022 to 21.5 gaw by 20 30 which is about four times more that they had previously

charge their phone and be able to call their customers whenever my friends comes to my house and they see that I use solar they are like wow that they need to have it they wish they could have it in their home also the need for energy really lend itself to a solar Revolution but people I spoke to who were skeptical and said you know there's some

obstacles still people are not necessarily thinking about the ecological footprint they're thinking about their savings and securing access to energy Sola is quite expensive up front and the revenues in Nigeria are not that strong for most people and so that's a big obstacle to solar currently I don't have Sola because I will not be able to buy is so expensive as I heard about it maybe

if they bring down the price to our own that we can buy for our own size that we can buy there's not enough financing Solutions most financing won't go beyond 3 years which still adds up to quite an expensive expense for solar um even if on the long term it's still cheaper than fossil fuel energy Nigerians are quite impatient with the government in that they don't

really expect much so basically when they're looking at solutions they tend to look at the things they can do by themselves and that's why the solar home systems is what people are really zeroing in on so we're probably going to be in a situation where solar is also going to have different products according to what you can [Applause] afford if the solar boom actually takes off

in Nigeria it could be the first example of distributed offgrid solar at a great scale level um according to analysts that we've spoken to that would make Nigeria unique in that sense in that in the same way that it currently is now a generator country it could be a solar country but not from solar grids but rather from offgrade solo Solutions in people's homes a very

really want to solve and help Nigeria to transition from the dirty foil and now even very expensive foil to clean energy as solar we needed to react to the market to bring to the market a product that millions of Nigerians will be able to afford and will solve their moderate energy need currently generators in Lagos account for 15,000 megaw of power if solar does just a

fraction of that it would be still be a huge amount of solar off grid and that is unique and something that potentially other countries could learn from a lot of countries are facing energy poverty or energy unreliability [Music] issues