Power for Africa

It’s not every day you get to design an electric supply system from scratch.  I am working with one of my colleagues from Nigeria to put together a model for development of the electric power supply system in his country.  Despite sitting on large deposits of coal, oil, and gas, there is virtually no central station power in the country, and what little there is operates literally only 20% of the time, so it is almost worthless.  The country is running on distributed generation (diesel gensets ) with costs so high that manufacturing is not cost effective, causing high imports and a lack of local jobs.  This project will create jobs and electricity.  (They are not worried about their carbon footprint just yet.)  I am also suggesting a cooperative business model J (couldn’t resist).