Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja
The National Association of Small Scale Industrialists (NASSI) in Nigeria and Glodanif Energy Limited (GEL), have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the provision of reliable and affordable electricity for members of the association clustered around industrial sites nationwide.
Planned to come at affordable tariffs, President of NASSI, Dr Solomon Vongfa, who spoke in Abuja at the MoU signing event at the weekend, explained that there was the need to boost power supply to small scale industrialists, using the green energy model.
Signing the Green Industrialisation Partnership deal, Vongfa described it as a private sector driven initiative to mitigate challenges of stable power being encountered by NASSI members.
“This process to us should have started since yesterday, not even today because light is a major problem for our small scale entrepreneurs all over the country. A lot of them have been running on diesel and you know the cost of energy now in Nigeria.
“So with green energy which is now globally accepted and it is the current thing that the world is working towards, we have seen how the government of our nation has embraced it.
“We see it as an advantage for our members if we can put them in a captive cluster, so that the megawatts that will be produced will be of great value to them and we are sure that we will have 24 hours light.
“If we are able to have 24 hours light at affordable price, it will make our businesses to thrive . It will create more jobs, reduce poverty and propel our economy to higher growth.
“What we are bringing is to mobilise our people to key in. That’s our major contribution, because if you produce light and nobody takes it, it is of no use. So our people are the ones that will use the light for their benefit and for the progress of the nation,” Vongfa stated.
Speaking earlier, Chief Executive Officer of Glodanif Energy, Mr. Ayodele Olaitan, said the aim of the scheme is to drive industrial and local production processes through affordable, new and renewable energy.
He emphasised that because of the unreliability of the national grid, business have had to devise means to self-generate electricity to ensure that their businesses keep running.
“It’s a known fact that the gap between the demand and available electricity available from the grid in Nigeria has led to widespread self-generation of power both in our homes and industrial sector.
“Today, most businesses must generate their own power to run and operate their business at a high cost, a situation that has made a lot of these businesses to go out of circulation and in this case mostly affected are the small and medium scale industries.
“Also, we are all aware of global warming as a collective agenda to protect our environment by discouraging the use of fossil fuel in running our day to day life, business and industrial operations.
“To this end, in our private initiative to complement government efforts to fix our power sector, grow our industries as well as protect our environment, we developed the idea, the green industrialization initiative.
“The motive behind the initiative is to provide clean and affordable environmentally friendly energy to produce reliable power supply to small and medium scale industries in cluster arrangement,” Olaitan stated.
He lamented that lack of adequate power supply has seriously constrained businesses in the country, observing that there was the need for
“Knowing fully well the problems associated with power outage had a huge negative impact on the operation of small and medium scale industries which has even sent huge numbers of them out of business.
“Upon the foregoing, we decided to seek partnership with the association to see how we can jointly provide solution and help small and medium scale industrialists through the Green Industrialisation Initiative,” he pointed out.
Olaitan stated that the tariff structure of the scheme will be based on cost-reflective tariff with full adoption of the prepaid metering system.
He added that this will be in line with principle laid down for different classes of consumers as defined by the National Electricity Regulation Commission (NERC) for captive and embedded Independent Power Producers’ (IPP) operations.
