Nigerian minigrids improve power reliability and utility revenues for communities “under” the grid

The town of Toto in the central Nigerian state of Nasarawa, near the national capital of Abuja, is wired for electricity. Though poles and wires dot the landscape, people live without power.

Toto is connected to the country’s main grid, and it has a local distribution system built years ago to provide electricity to the community. But that infrastructure is now in shambles, disfigured by chronic lack of maintenance and widespread “tapping” or electricity theft. According to John Ufeoshi, the Lagos-based business and project development lead for interconnected minigrids at PowerGen Renewable Energy, the existing distribution system is useless and needs to be rebuilt entirely.

Toto is like many African communities that nominally have electricity access, but the quality is poor or non-existent. In a 2018 report on the potential for minigrids in Nigeria, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) estimated 200 million “undergrid” households worldwide. That’s almost as many people as those with no access to electricity at all. People living in these grid-connected communities, or undergrid, often struggle with unpredictable blackouts, power rationing, affordability or lack of any power at all, according to the RMI report.

PowerGen and Abuja Electricity Distribution Company negotiate a minigrid and grid power-sharing agreement

In what John Ufeoshi calls a “win-win-win” arrangement, microgrid developer PowerGen is building a minigrid for Toto that will supply reliable power during the daytime, while the “DisCo,” the term used for electricity distribution companies in Nigeria, will deliver grid electricity at night. According to Ufeoshi, through this collaboration, the community will have access to reliable power, the utility will have a new influx of revenues, and PowerGen will benefit financially from its operations and maintenance of the solar PV generation and newly installed distribution systems. He explained that PowerGen’s financial benefit would come from managing the customer connections during the project’s tenure.

Founded in Nairobi as a developer of off-grid systems, this is PowerGen’s first time building a microgrid for a grid-connected community. PowerGen hopes the arrangement — with PowerGen selling renewable power to the town during the day and buying electricity from the Abuja DisCo at night — will establish a positive precedent.

“This is a really good fit,” Ufeoshi said, “because PowerGen has experience managing customers at the grid edge, while the Abuja Electricity DisCo is more suited to urban environments.” PowerGen will install smart meters that make revenue collection more efficient and enable remote monitoring via controls and sophisticated information technology infrastructure. Together, these new technologies should cut down on theft and vandalism while ushering in new economic opportunities for the town.

Commissioning is planned for August 2022

PowerGen microgrid engineer Elisha Chesir used HOMER Pro to create simulations of the new system, determine optimal solar and battery system sizes and find the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) for customers. Chesir has designed dozens of African minigrids for PowerGen using HOMER Pro, but this one was different because it required modeling the contribution of grid power from the DisCo.

“With HOMER Pro, you are able to simulate when the grid is available and see the impact of blackouts,” he said. “We asked ourselves, when will the community use microgrid power and when they will use grid power? Can backup diesel engines keep the power flowing if the grid goes down? HOMER Pro allows us to make good decisions because we were able to input so many parameters; the HOMER model can balance all this information.”

Loads can be difficult to predict for new electricity users

One of the biggest unknowns when modeling microgrids for first-time electricity users is how much electricity they will need. “We don’t have consumption characteristics,” Chesir said. “And we know from experience that when you bring in power for the first time, people start buying appliances. These are the things that are a challenge to determine.”