By Adewale Sanyaolu
The National Association of Small Scale Industrialists (NASSI) in its bid to break its dependence on electricity supply from the national grid system has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Glodanif Energy Limited for the supply of off grid electricity to its members within cluster zones
President, Association of Small Scale industrialists in Nigeria, Dr Solomon Vongfa, made the declaration in Abuja at the weekend.
The event was the signing of Green Industrialization Partnership Memorandum of Understanding with Glodanif Energy Limited.
By the terms of the deal, christened ‘Green Industrialization’ Glodanif Energy is expected to produce a stable, affordable electricity to small scale industrialists, clustered together in an industrial site at affordable tariff.
Vongfa who signed the deal on behalf of its members described it as a noble private sector driven initiative to mitigate challenges of stable power being encountered by his members.
“This process to us should have started since yesterday not even today because electricity is a major problem for our small scale entrepreneurs all over the country. A lot of them have been running on diesel, You know what is the cost of energy now in Nigeria. So we feel with the green energy which is now globally accepted and it is the current thing that the world is working towards.
We have seen how the government of our nation has embraced it. We see it as an advantage for our members, if we can put them in a captive cluster so that the megawatts that will be produced will be of great value to them and we are sure that we will have at least 24 hours electricity.
If we are able to have 24 hours electricity at affordable price, it will make our businesses thrive. It will create more jobs, reduce poverty and propel our economy to higher growth.
What we are bringing is to mobilise our people to key in into the initiative. That’s our major contribution because if you produce electricity and nobody takes it, it is of no use. So our people are the ones that will use the light for their benefit and for the progress of the nation.”
Earlier in his remarks, Chief Executive Officer of Glodanif Energy, Mr. Ayodele Olaitan, said the aim of the scheme is to drive industrial and local production processes through affordable, new and renewable energy.
“It’s a known fact that the gap between the demand and available electricity from the grid in Nigeria has led to widespread self-generation of power both in our homes and industrial sector…”
Today most businesses must generate their own power to run and operate their business at a high cost, a situation that has made a lot of these businesses to go out of circulation, in this case mostly affected are the small and medium scale industries.
Also, we are all aware of global warming as collective agenda to protect our environment by discouraging the use of fossil fuel in running our day to day life, business and industrial operations”.
“To this end, in our private initiative to compliment Government efforts to fix our power sector, grow our industries as well as protect our environment, we developed the idea: Green Industrialization Initiative. The motive behind the initiative is to provide clean and affordable environmentally friendly energy to produce reliable power supply to small and medium scale industries in cluster arrangement.
“Knowing fully well the problems associated with power outage which has a huge negative impact on the operation of small and medium scale industries which have sent huge numbers of them out of business. Upon the foregoing, we decided to seek partnership with NASSI to see how we can jointly provide solution and help small and medium scale industrialists through GREEN Industrialization Initiative.
“Olaitan maintained that the tariff structure for the project would be based on cost effective tariff with absolute adoption of prepaid system in line with principle of different classes of consumers as defined by regulations from the Nigerian Electricity Electric Regulatory Commission (NERC) for captive and embedded IPP operations.”