The Managing Director of the Rural Electrification Agency (REA), Dr Abba Aliyu has proposed the development of digital energy Zones that would combine electricity, digital infrastructure and productive economic activity in selected locations as Nigeria seeks to position its power sector for the growing demands of artificial intelligence and the digital economy.
The proposal was made by the Managing Director/CEO in the second part of his two-part article on the future of electrification in the age of AI.
Aliyu argued that Nigeria should move beyond measuring rural electrification primarily by the number of households connected and begin assessing the economic activity created by reliable electricity.
Under the proposed model, locations could be developed around combinations of power, land, fibre connectivity, water availability and other infrastructure needed by data centres, cloud services, AI computing, digital industrial parks and other technology-intensive businesses.
He said such zones could initially be located close to major cities, universities, industrial clusters, renewable-energy resources, gas infrastructure and existing high-capacity electricity networks.
According to him, REA and state governments could also develop smaller distributed-energy clusters that combine electricity generation and storage with productive demand.
The proposal represents a shift from treating electricity infrastructure simply as a means of connecting consumers to the grid towards using power as a platform for attracting businesses, investment and digital infrastructure.
Aliyu argued that future distributed-energy projects should deliberately identify locations where electricity demand from agriculture, manufacturing, telecommunications, public infrastructure and digital services can be aggregated around the same energy asset.
“This materially improves project economics,” he said.
The REA boss also proposed a broader rethink of Nigeria’s mini-grid model, arguing that the traditional question of how many households a project can connect should be complemented by a more commercially focused question: what economy can be created around the electricity asset?
Aliyu suggested that future mini-grid programmes should increasingly measure their impact through electricity deployed and consumed, businesses created, jobs generated, agricultural output, digital activity and private capital mobilised.
The objective, he said, should move from simply providing electricity to communities towards using electricity to generate prosperity.