World Bank to Commit $200 Million to Renewable Energy Project

As part of its commitment to the nation’s power sector, the World Bank has said it will commit over $200 million towards the implementation of renewable energy projects in Nigeria towards enhancing access and rural electrification.
The Bank's Country Director, Onno Ruhl, country director of the World Bank who disclosed this at a Rural Electrification and Renewable Energy workshop organized by the Ministry of Power and the World Bank, in Abuja, noted that all problems in the Nigerian electricity sector can not be solved by conventional sources or grid extensions.
According to him, the World Bank is committed to engaging the Nigerian governments at both Federal and state levels towards finding ways to bring electricity to “the many Nigerians who cannot be talking about having no light because they don't even have connections to their homes.”
“We want to initiate technologies that would bring faster solutions; it would involve a menu of solutions for Nigeria's power problem, because one of the problems that we have in Nigeria is that so much depends on this option of generating electricity exclusively from gas-powered thermal plants and hydro-generated power,” he stated.
Ruhl insisted that “the most important paradigm for accelerating growth, and reducing poverty and providing better health care and better livelihoods for Nigerians is to make sure that a lot more people have access to power.”
He added that, “The World Bank is very happy to be making this significant contribution to this effort by participating in the debate and providing the needed financing.
The most important thing to note, for us, is that the problem is so big and the opportunity is also big because many of the technologies we would be seeing have proven to be less encumbered by the challenges we have seen in traditional power generating and distribution technologies.”
Ruhl noted that Nigeria's Vision 2020 calls for a rapid industrialization of the country, “not just in Lagos or Abuja or Kano or Onitsha, but in many rural areas where people can contribute to growth through various activities, especially through agriculture and agri-business.”
He added that providing electricity in other ways than the grid system, would allow Nigeria to test modern green technologies that would help the country to develop a climate-friendly power system in the face of climate change problems across the globe.
“Many of the technologies for rural electrification such as hydro, wind and solar are much climate-friendly than the traditional systems of generating power.”
He said the Bank was working with the Federal government and a number of the state governments to analyse prevalent conditions in the different parts of the country, with regards to different geographic and climatic conditions in the country for the successful execution of the project.