The federal government has disclosed a new initiative for public institutions benefiting from solar electricity to pay tariffs to enable maintenance of the infrastructure and prevent deterioration.
The plan was disclosed during the launch of the Renewable Assets Management Company (RAMCO) by the Rural Electrification Agency (REA) on Wednesday.
The agency said the introduction of asset management is to end the culture of MDAs going back to the government to seek new funds for the same projects a few years after completion.
Speaking during the event, the Managing Director of REA, Aliyu Abba Abubakar, said the decision to establish RAMCO came after investigation showed early solar projects constructed could not be maintained despite providing free electricity and enabling beneficiary agencies to cut billions from diesel generators.
He explained that RAMCO is not a revenue generating company but to serve as an emergency funds company for institutions when any installation goes faulty, thus removing reliance from government coffers to fund such repairs.
“In RAMCO, we are building an institution that learns, improves and continues-regardless of who occupies the leadership position. RAMCO is not another government agency, it is a company incorporated under the Companies and Allied Matters Act, with Federal Government interests held through the Ministry of Finance Incorporated and governed by a professional board. Its mandate is straightforward: manage publicly financed renewable-energy assets professionally; contract competent operators; meter, bill and collect; maintain sustainability reserves for major equipment replacement; and report transparently on asset performance.
“If a battery or inverter requires replacement in year eight, we should not return to the treasury in year eight looking for emergency funding. The money should already be there. RAMCO is also not designed to extract profit from public institutions and not another request for treasury funding. Its purpose is precisely the opposite: to move the long-term sustainability burden away from repeated public appropriation and onto a commercially sustainable platform capable, over time, of attracting private capital,” he said.
He added that beneficiary institutions must now contribute to sustain solar projects by paying for the electricity they consume, noting that sustainability tariff is not simply a new expense.
“It is the redirection of part of what an institution would otherwise spend on expensive and unreliable power towards preserving the asset providing reliable electricity. Reliable electricity is not free. The question is whether we pay repeatedly for diesel and failed infrastructure, or pay a predictable tariff that keeps a cleaner, more reliable system operating for twenty years,” he said.
disclosed that Nigeria had committed about N263 billion to solar-hybrid generation under the Energising Education Programme (EEP), covering 22 federal universities and three teaching hospitals.
Since the programme began in 2017, he said, about 82MW of solar-hybrid generation had been deployed, while more than 150MW was either under construction or in the pipeline through EEP phases, the Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-up (DARES), the National Public Sector Solarisation Initiative, TETFund projects and the Desert to Power programme.
But an assessment of seven sites delivered under the first phase of EEP exposed the scale of the maintenance challenge.
Aliyu said only three of the seven assessed facilities were found to be in good or usable condition.
The deterioration, he explained, was linked largely to the absence of sustainable maintenance arrangements, reliable revenue mechanisms and clearly designated institutions responsible for managing the assets throughout their economic lives.
On his part, the Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, said the tariff will be set at a price that is both appropriate and sustainable as well as create the bridge between deployment and sustainability, between public investment and private capital, between infrastructure and investable assets.
He added that the government is currently conducting technical audits that are broken.
“We will revisit the east and west super grid so that we can build resilience into our grid. We are struggling to wheel 5,000 megawatts today. My target is that by the end of this year, we’ll conveniently be wheeling 6,500. By the end of next year, we will be wheeling conveniently 8,000 megawatts,” he said.
Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare Dr. Iziaq Adekunle Salako said the project will enable the sustainability of renewable energy in healthy institutions since the grid has proven unreliable.
Minister of Education, Dr. Maruf Tunji Alausa, said the project will enable tertiary institutions to continue sustaining power on their campuses.
He disclosed that no fewer than 15 universities are currently solarised, saying, “The challenge for us today is no longer therefore about building renewable energy infrastructure, it is about ensuring that these assets are properly operated, maintained and preserved so that enormous investments made by the government continue to deliver value for Nigerians…This is where RAMCO becomes important.”
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https://dailytrust.com/fg-to-introduce-solar-power-tarriff-in-public-institutions/
