Objectives

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, the national electricity grid delivers power supply to a fraction of its population, with frequent power blackouts. Most households and businesses are forced to rely on expensive and polluting petrol and diesel generators as backup to an unreliable grid. Nigeria alone relies on tens of millions of generators for this purpose.

In 2022, Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) launched a funding round in Nigeria to help displace these generators with equivalent solar-battery systems, through the Universal Energy Facility (UEF), the multi-donor results-based financing (RBF) facility that we manage on behalf of a coalition of partners. The ‘Stand-Alone Solar for Productive Use’ (SSPU) programme pursues aligned objectives on energy access, climate change and development, providing clean and affordable energy to households and small businesses whilst also fast-tracking the displacement of gasoline and diesel generators, and promoting job creation and economic productivity.

Partners

The Universal Energy Facility was established by SEforALL with a coalition of partners including The Rockefeller Foundation, UKaid, USAID, GIZ, Shell Foundation, Good Energies Foundation, the Carbon Trust, and the Africa Minigrid Developers Association. The Facility’s SSPU programme is supported by the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP), IKEA Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation. The fund relies on a digital payments platform that was developed in partnership with Odyssey Energy Solutions. For SSPU funding, the Facility works with a range of qualified renewable energy companies active in the Nigerian market.

Technologies Supported

Our project supports 100% solar and battery energy storage solutions with the capacity to replace gasoline and diesel generators on a one-for-one basis.

Our Role

SEforALL acts as the programme and fund manager for the UEF. We worked to develop the standard operating procedures for the fund, and to build partnerships with renewable energy associations in Nigeria and across Africa (the UEF is active in five countries at the time of writing). We coordinated with a community of donors and practitioners of results-based financing through an ‘RBF Leadership Group’ and consulted on the design and development of the fund’s implementation framework. Together with our partners, SEforALL mobilized a first round of funding of USD 10 million to support ten renewable energy companies to deploy over 3,500 electricity connections in Nigeria.

Results

The SSPU programme’s 2022 launch in Nigeria immediately received applications from qualified project developers to deliver over 25,000 solar battery connections to customers, displacing thousands of backup generators and avoiding over 33,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) greenhouse gas emissions per annum. In February 2023, we signed grant agreements with ten of these companies for a total of USD 10 million in grant funding available, leaving an immediate opportunity to fund a further 20 qualified companies on a ‘wait-list’ with viable solar projects that could deliver an additional 22,000 new electricity connections within the next two years.

Source: Sustainable Energy for all