Chineme Okafor in Abuja
A mechanical engineering team led by the immediate former Minister of Power, Prof. Chinedu Nebo, has disclosed its invention of an innovative fuel-efficient power generation system which by its design will run on very low fuel to produce optimum power outputs.
In addition to the fuel-efficient system, the team also said it has created another power system that would run on renewable energy sources like sun and biomass to generate electricity without fossil fuel.
Codenamed ‘power-seed wed machine’, the preliminary details of the system was presented to the Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonanya Onu last Monday in Abuja by Nebo when he paid Onu a courtesy visit.
Nebo stated that his engineering team had spent time test-running the fuel-efficient system and would deploy it to select tertiary educational institutions in the country to power their operations for one year before commercialising it.
He noted that the fuel-efficient power generating system was designed to use electro-technical and mechatronic technology to produce power through iteration.
According to him, just about 20 per cent of the amount of fuel needed by existing power generating systems to generate a kilowatt hour of power would be used by the system.
He added that the renewable energy powered system would run completely without fossil fuel in homes and offices.
“Honourable minister, it is true that I have come to pay a courtesy call on you, but I have also come to tell you that something good is happening.
“I am confident to tell you that the days of the big power systems that consume lots of fuel are numbered with our invention. We have invented a power delivery system that will drastically reduce fuel and maintenance cost as well as infrastructure cost,” Nebo said.
He then explained: “Before I ended my tenure as a federal minister of power, I had chanted to all who wanted to listen, that the big power machines, those mighty turbines that have several hundred megawatts capacities may take decades to solve Nigeria’s power problem and for that reason, we needed to do embedded small scale power generators. “This was actually developed by our formidable engineering team and it is about 15 years ahead of the present power delivery system.”
He said: “From a layman’s perspective, we have designed and tested a power seed web machine that uses the same quantity of fuel needed to generate a small capacity generator to generate 10 times or more what ordinarily was possible.
“The fuel consumption of our machine is not up to a 25 kilowatts machine but we are able to produce 250 kilowatts and the possibility to produce one megawatts but we are cut short to one megawatts because of the licencing issue.”
“Using our innovative design, we have been able to use a power ovary primary source coupled with our designed electro-technical and mechatronic gadget to produce what we call power seed that through iteration, has the potential to produce power outputs in huge multiples of the input fuel and power.
“For instance, the fuel needed for a 25 kilowatt power, we can use it to produce 250 kilowatts and we have tested it primarily but not on a continuous process for a 500 kilowatts and there is no problem because this is a seed web design.”
The former minister stated that high power users can now get electricity less expensively and that the system will use less volumes of fuel per hour in its operation. He however added that it would not be in the market until after a year.
On the renewable generator, he said: “We have also designed one that does not need fossil fuel and that will be the next generation of our designs made by Nigeria by Nigerian engineers for Nigerian populace.”
Onu in his remarks, noted that the government was excited by the development as it represents its desire to move Nigeria from a resource-based country to a knowledge-based one.
He pledged the government’s support in protecting the invention and copyright abuse.
