Original Story Published by: James Sherwood for GreenBiz
Photography courtesy of: Rocky Mountain Institute
(Above) Community members in Alapako Oni, Nigeria. Nigerians spend $14 billion annually for unreliable, inefficient, polluting power that can cost up to $0.70 per kilowatt-hour.
For a glimpse of a huge opportunity for both business and improving lives in the developing world, spend some time with Finian Oyem in the rural Nigerian village of Onyen-Okpon.
Oyem grows cocoa, cassava and yams. But the town is 4 miles away from the nearest electricity grid connection, so his power comes from a petrol-fueled engine and generator, or genset.
That electricity is expensive: up to $0.52 per kilowatt-hour (kWh). That’s more than five times the average retail price in the United States. Moreover, the genset power is noisy, polluting and unreliable, and it comes with additional maintenance costs. It’s no surprise, then, that many of the 500 households in Onyen-Okpon have no electricity at all: They shell out an average of $6 per month for kerosene and for charging cell phones.
The market for clean, reliable electricity in Nigeria alone would be at least $9.4 billion per year, analysis from Rocky Mountain Institute shows.
The high cost of power in Onyen-Okpon is a serious drag on the village’s economic potential. It’s also a major problem for the entire nation, afflicting tens of thousands of other communities in Nigeria, from small villages such as Onyen-Okpon to massive centers of commerce such as the huge Sabon Gari Market in Kano, powered until recently by hundreds of gensets. The lack of a reliable national grid has forced Nigerians to turn to a staggering total of 10 gigawatts of expensive, often unreliable, genset power — and still more than half of the nation’s 186 million people (and 1.2 billion around the world overall) have no electricity at all. This lack of affordable, reliable electricity holds back economic development all across sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
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