It’s 10 PM. The lights in your village of Chibok, in a remote corner of Nigeria, went out for the night half an hour before. Blackness and quiet cover the land, and you drift off to sleep in your bed in the girls’ dormitory. Suddenly, you are startled awake by footsteps and loud voices – men’s voices – telling you that the village is under attack, and that they are soldiers here to keep you safe. “Hurry! Hurry now!” they implore. “Get on the bus! Quickly! You must come with us – now!” There is no light, only a few torches held by the men, and you rush to the bus in alarm. Only when you are on the road, in their bus or truck, do you realize with horror that these are no soldiers. These men are not your rescuers, but your captors.
And so it was that 276 school girls were brutally kidnapped in the night, because there were no lights to reveal the truth.
The Chibok kidnapping launched an international outrage against the Boko Haram terrorist group that had been in the habit of kidnapping women and girls in Northeast Nigeria. After the initial slow-footed response, the government sent a delegation to the affected communities, including Chibok. I recently had the pleasure of meeting with a member of that delegation. This official told the story of how the villagers were thankful for the enhanced military protection, but what they felt would be most effective for providing security was electricity.
Electricity at the Chibok school, where the girls were kidnapped, is provided by a diesel generator that only runs until 9:30 in the evening – a common situation in areas where there is no other electricity at all. Boko Haram waited until 10 PM, when the village and school were pitch dark, to strike. Their ruse was easy to pull off because of the darkness.
For over 20 years HOMER has played a central role in bringing sustainable 24-hour power to thousands of villages like Chibok, Nigeria. We have always been motivated by the tremendous difference that a little bit of consistent power can bring to the 1.3 billion people in the world who live without it. We have focused on its benefits to social development like education, healthcare, and to economic development, like agriculture and infrastructure. Electricity allows medical clinics to operate and vaccines to be kept at the right temperature. Electricity allows children to study in the evening. Electricity allows parents to run cottage industries in their homes and builds little ecosystems of economic activities in locales where it is a given.
This story about the Chibok girls kidnapping in Nigeria illustrates an even more compelling reason for rural electrification. Security comes first. There are places all over the world, but especially in Africa, where there can be no improvements to health, education, or economic development because there is no security. I had always thought that security came before electricity, but this tragedy is a clear message to the world that electricity brings security.
Governments and international development agencies are still promoting grid extension as a solution to rural electrification. But the grid may very well never reach places like Chibok, Nigeria, and doing so makes no sense in any case, due to the isolated nature and geographic distance between these communities. The central grid in most places like Nigeria cannot provide reliable service even to the main urban cities. Extending an already overextended grid only makes that problem worse and makes little economic sense.
The solution is hybrid renewable power – a combination of sun, storage, sometimes wind, and a generator backup. The HOMER software has shown how it is possible today to bring cost-effective, reliable, sustainable, 24-hour power to Chibok and other areas of the world that deserve to have the lights on. There are solutions.
Excelent article with a different point of view about Boko Haram kidnapping. Electricity has a critical contribution to the community security, specially in sensitive areas like remote villages in conflict areas or refugees camps. And it is not necessarily to wait until grid extension arrive. The highest priority is to get universal electricity access to level 2 or 3 than to get electricity level 5 in the future.The sense of urgency is critical in electricity access.
Would attackers not be able to easily cut the power to the microgrid in advance of such an attack? Public lighting at night, whether from microgrids or solar street lights, can surely bring added security for village residents, especially women and girls, and Homer would be right to call attention to this. But claiming that microgrids can prevent coordinated attacks such as what occurred in Chibok is giving them too much credit, as the article seems to do in the passages below:
“This story about the Chibok girls kidnapping in Nigeria illustrates an even more compelling reason for rural electrification.”
“…this tragedy is a clear message to the world that electricity brings security.”
I suggest that the way this article is written makes it look like Homer is making tenuous connections between a terrible tragedy and microgrids to plug own agenda, which I assume is not your intention. So I suggest rethinking how this is framed.
Prof. Felix Dayo
Coordinator, Energy Environment Research Group (EERG)
FUO
While having a micro-grid facility in a village or serving a cluster of villages may not singly stop the activities of terrorist organizations, a well lighted village either by a micro-grid or by grid extension will serve as an effective deterrence to such activities. I am of the opinion that what the article is trying to establish is the fact that the traditional grid extension strategy of lighting up villages remote to the grid has not yielded an omnibus success in several projects worldwide. Its therefore time to look more deeply into the micro-grid alternative. This is the same thinking that is now guiding an ongoing Microgrid R&D at the Federal University Otuoke in Bayelsa State Nigeria as a critical Energy Access Program of the University. This is NOT only a University based research, but covers the development of real life Microgrid, that will serve communities NOT currently served by the national grid. It is planned that such systems will have hybrid renewable power generation alternatives (Solar, Wind, Biomass fueled Power Systems etc.), with smart grid and smart metering components. This initiative, which is at the beginning of its development, is expected to result in the development of a Microgrid Test Bed Research Facility at FUO. HOMER Software is one of the tools that will play a major role in the development of the systems.