Expert Seeks Stakeholders Collaboration against Influx of Quacks, Substandard Products in Solar Industry

Peter Uzoho

With no legislation backing the burgeoning solar energy industry in Nigeria at the moment, an industry expert has stressed the need for genuine players in the sector and relevant authorities to collaborate to fight the influx of inexperienced installers and substandard solar systems into the country.

The Managing Director of Gennex Technologies Limited, a sister company of Petrocam Trading Nigeria Limited, Mr. Patrick Ilo, said the solar sector is being challenged by a number of issues that need to be tackled before they mature to bigger problems that would become difficult to deal with.

Ilo stated this at a press conference in Lagos ahead of the Gennex Colloquium 2022 holding in Lagos next week, with the topic: “Delivering Sustainable Energy Access across Africa”.

He said the renewable energy sector has made tremendous progress over the last several years, beginning from opening up the sector to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to standardisation of inputs to key policy thrusts designed to galvanise investments in the sector and to ensuring smooth transition to clean energy.

He noted, however, that despite the giant strides, challenges still abound in the sector that need urgent attention and measure to address them.

Ilo, said, “One of the major challenges confronting our sector is how to properly size and design solar solutions to make them more cost-effective and at the same time durable.

“At Gennex, we have blazed the trail by coming up with innovative approaches to tackling this problem, but the situation in the entire industry is not helped by the proliferation of inexperienced and unqualified solar installers who advise commercial, industrial and even residential customers on solutions design and sizing, and choice of inputs.

“Secondly, the industry is still grappling with the challenge of substandard inputs and components, which has the capacity to lower the confidence of customers in their journey to transition to renewable energy.

“The final challenge the industry is grappling with is how to ensure that commercial and industrial customers, as well as other end-users have access to innovative financial packages to assist them in the uptake of solar solutions.”

Stating that those issues were germane to the development of the entire solar and renewable energy industry in Nigeria, he added that the industry players and policy makers cannot play the ostrich and pretend that those issues do not matter or affect the development of the industry.

As a leading player and thought leader in the industry, Ilo said the company strongly believed that its role in the industry was to provoke discussions on those challenges and highlight solutions to them, pointing out that those challenges necessitated the Gennex Colloquium 2022.

The managing director explained that the colloquium was put together to bring industry leaders and experts, policy actors, leading energy companies, financial institutions, civil society as well as end-users into the same room to discuss those challenges confronting the sector.

“Our expectation is that by bringing the entire ecosystem together to highlight and distil these issues and solutions, we will have workable plans of action going forward. Through Gennex Colloquium 2022, we are also optimistic that we will be able to place on the table of policy actors, critical insights and agenda that would galvanise the development of the entire renewable energy industry.

“We need a deliberate industry-wide stakeholder collaboration to be able to unleash the potential of solar energy in Nigeria.”

Founded six years ago with the vision of revolutionalising the off-grid solar and renewable energy space in Nigeria, Ilo maintained that Gennex had remained true to the vision, saying through its cost-effective and durable innovative solar solutions, it had helped many companies and individuals across Nigeria make seamless transition to clean, renewable energy.

He informed that the company has powered in excess of 10,000 homes in the country since its establishment.