By Seun Ibiyemi
The Rural Electrification Agency (REA) is seeking to reposition electricity access as a driver of economic growth, with its Managing Director, Dr Abba Aliyu, proposing a new model that links power supply directly to businesses, jobs and investment.
Aliyu, in the second part of his two-part article on electrification in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), said Nigeria must move beyond measuring rural electrification by the number of households connected to electricity.
He argued that the impact of power projects should increasingly be assessed by the economic activities they generate, including businesses established, jobs created, agricultural output, digital services and private investment attracted.
Under the proposed model, REA and state governments could establish Digital Energy Zones where electricity generation and storage are integrated with digital infrastructure and productive economic activities.
Such zones, he said, could bring together power, land, fibre connectivity, water and other infrastructure required by data centres, cloud-computing facilities, AI businesses and digital industrial parks.
Aliyu said strategic locations near major cities, universities, industrial clusters, renewable energy resources, gas infrastructure and high-capacity electricity networks could serve as initial sites for the development of the zones.
He also proposed smaller distributed-energy clusters designed around productive users such as agricultural processors, manufacturers, telecommunications companies and digital businesses.
According to him, concentrating electricity demand around a common energy asset would improve the commercial viability of distributed-energy projects.
“This materially improves project economics,” Aliyu said.
The REA boss further called for a rethink of Nigeria’s mini-grid strategy, saying the success of such projects should not be determined solely by the number of households connected.
Instead, he said, developers should ask what economic ecosystem can be built around each electricity asset.
Future programmes, he proposed, should therefore track electricity consumption, businesses created, employment generated, agricultural production, digital activity and private capital mobilised.
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The approach would effectively shift rural electrification from a model focused primarily on access to electricity to one centred on productive use of electricity.
Aliyu said the strategy could enable Nigeria to leverage its power infrastructure to attract new businesses and investment while preparing the country for rising electricity demand from AI and other technology-intensive industries.
He stressed that the ultimate goal of electrification should be to transform reliable power supply into higher productivity, employment and improved economic opportunities for communities.
