Unilorin Gets 500 Megawatts Solar Energy Estimated at N600b

109 views0

Unilorin Gets 500 Megawatts Solar Energy Estimated at N600b

By Correspondent

 The Management of University of Ilorin, Kwara State, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding, MoU, with an American company, Arrow Capital Solar Company, to produce 500 megawatts of solar energy.The project which would commence immediately would gulp N600 billion and is expected to be completed in October this year. This is the first of its kind in the Nigerian universities as well as the Sub-Region.Speaking to journalists in Ilorin, the Kwara state capital over the weekend, the Chief Executive Officer of Arrow Capital Solar Company, Brian Travis, while signing the MoU said the project is strictly private sector driven and that it is an absolute demonstration of private sector initiative by the American company in Nigeria.Travis echoed that University of Ilorin, among several other universities in Nigeria, was selected for the project because of its strategic location.The American also pointed out that the institution is an ideal location for solar power; since the backbone of the electricity distribution in the country runs through the line of the institution.Moreover, Travis said his company was buoyed by President Muhammadu Buhari’s announcement during his official visit to America that Nigeria was highly committed to solar power.“The project is roughly N600 billion and is expected, when completed in about five months’ time, to produce 500 megawatts of solar energy.“It is going to supply 10 percent of power to Nigeria; we have three major grids and with significant power we will extend to Lagos, Kano and other parts of the country,” Travis added.In his remarks, the Vice Chancellor of the University, Prof. Abdul-Ganiyu Ambali said the total electricity consumption of the university is four percent, noting that the company has made necessary arrangement to sell the remaining 496 megawatts to the federal government to boost power supply in the country.Ambali explained, “We at the University of Ilorin see the project as an opportunity to contribute to the efforts of the federal government of Nigeria in terms of power generation and distribution.“Again, we are looking at the benefits the University will derive from the whole exercise, among which is the constant power supply to our university. We cannot over-emphasise the need for that because we have a lot of departments that depend on constant power supply, most especially our biomedical research. We recently commissioned a Centre for Research Laboratory and we have quite a number of research groups being encouraged to do research and we all know that we cannot carry out scientific research appropriately without constant power supply.”To Prof. Ambali, the project would go a long way to encourage the graduate students of the university in their research to generate data that would be acceptable and comparable to others across the globe.The Vice Chancellor speculated that From the solar panel assembly plant that would be built by the company would afford their engineering students to have a state-of-the-art training and skills in producing solar panels, while it would also afford the institution’s entrepreneurship centre the unique opportunity to train the middle level manpower that would be needed to assemble and maintain such facilities whenever they are made available to the public.“The positive effects that the project will have on Kwara State, on Nigeria as a whole are enormous and we look forward to the fruitful completion of the project and its inauguration in October this year,” Ambali added. 

Discover more from NewsBreakers

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

What's your reaction?

Excited
0
Happy
0
In Love
0
Not Sure
0
Silly
0
Previous
Next

Comments are closed.