IHS Secures $162,000 Grant To Promote Clean Energy

The US government, through The US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) signed an agreement with IHS Nigeria Plc, Africa’s leading telecommunications Infrastructure Company, to provide a grant to finance the study for deployment of solar power systems at the company’s telecom sites throughout Nigeria.  The grant will benefit IHS Nigeria by assessing alternative energy solutions aimed at reducing the use of diesel generators. 
A signing ceremony to confer the $162,000 technical assistance grant was held at the U.S. Consulate in Lagos, Nigeria.  Robin Sanders, U.S. Ambassador and William Saad, managing director signed the grant agreement on behalf of the U.S. Government and IHS Nigeria Plc, respectively.
The US Trade and Development Agency, advances economic development and US commercial interests in developing and middle-income countries.  The agency funds various forms of technical assistance, early investment analysis, training, orientation visits and business workshops that support the development of a modern infrastructure and a fair and open trading environment.  USTDA’s strategic use of foreign assistance funds to support sound investment policy and decision-making in host countries creates an enabling environment for trade, investment and sustainable economic development. 
IHS Nigeria operates about 2,500 cellular communications towers in sub-Saharan Africa. It leases tower space to clients and manages tower infrastructure on its clients’ behalf.  In order to guarantee their customers adequate, uninterrupted power, IHS powers all of its sites with diesel generators.  Sites must be refueled on a weekly basis, resulting in significant costs and exposing IHS Nigeria to market fluctuations in the price of diesel fuel, making cost management and financial forecasting extremely difficult.
To address the problem IHS Nigeria is interested in deploying solar power and other alternative energy solutions at its tower sites.  The USTDA-funded technical assistance program will assist IHS Nigeria in evaluating energy alternatives, developing performance specifications, and arranging a technical visit to the United States for IHS Nigeria decision makers to meet with U.S. companies offering renewable energy solutions.  IHS Nigeria hopes to use this opportunity to attract a U.S. company to establish a pilot demonstration at one of IHS Nigeria’ tower sites in order to verify the solution’s viability and cost savings, and develop  an implementation plan for scaling up the solution to a larger number of IHS’ tower sites. 
IHS has already imported wind turbines and is currently assessing the viability of such an alternative at selected locations.
In 2008, IHS (an ISO9001-2008 certified company) was granted a license by Nigerian Communications Commission to provide site leasing and sharing services. Under this model, the Company builds/operates telecommunications sites and makes it available to various Telecom operators under a sharing model. This formula saves the operators considerable amounts of money in Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) and Operational Expenditure (OPEX) and allows them to focus on quality issues and network coverage.  Apart from this, Collocation helps in reducing environmental pollution as infrastructure sharing will reduce the number of generators emitting carbon into the environment. This service is seen by the stake holders in the industry as an excellent way to relieve telecom operators of the headaches of site management.
Currently, IHS operates hundreds of sites for collocation services across the country and has achieved huge success by signing up several leaders of the industry to its services.
The company which was set up in 2001 has been carrying out the business of infrastructure deployment and management for various telecommunications firms and has been a staunch advocate of collocation in order to drive down prices of telecom services for the utmost benefit of the general public. I HS is currently present is several African countries including Ghana, Sudan and Tanzania and is the recipient of many awards for innovation.
IHS (Nigeria) plc is a publicly traded company on the Nigerian Stock Exchange.