Providing reliable power across Nigeria

Nigeria

Habeeb Alebiosu, managing director of Viathan, talks to The Energy Year about the company’s new power generation model and its plans for expansion. Viathan Engineering specialises in captive and embedded power generation and currently owns and operates seven power generation facilities in Nigeria.

What was the driving force behind Viathan’s inception?
For many years, Nigeria has experienced challenges with providing energy for everyone. A huge segment (about 45%) of the population is off-grid, and those who are on-grid experience intermittent power. We are a country of about 200 million with an estimated 4,500 MW of electricity to share. We founded Viathan to reliably deliver clean energy to commercial, industrial and residential sectors of the economy. We initially commenced with a single customer, Lagos State. We signed a 10-year PPA in 2015 with the State as part of their mission to provide reliable power for public facilities, such as hospitals, courthouses, street lights, bridges and more. This catalysed our business by enabling us to raise capital to build our first power plant in Lekki Lagos, along with a 23-kilometre underground distribution network to deliver power from the plant to various load centres.
Viathan pioneered the embedded generation model in Nigeria and enabled the Lagos State government to shift from diesel-based generators to cleaner, gas-based electricity. The model worked well, and so we acquired and built additional power plants to provide power not only to government users but also to businesses in the commercial, industrial and residential sectors. Viathan currently owns/operates seven power plants with a combined capacity of about 42 MW. Two of these plants were completed in 2022.
Viathan is not only a power business but also very active in the gas space. Our gas activities are organised under Gasco Marine (Gasco). Gasco built and operates a compressed natural gas (CNG) production plant in Abeokuta, Ogun State. It also operates a virtual pipeline to deliver the CNG. The virtual pipeline consists of trucks and gas skids that transport and deliver CNG to Viathan facilities as well as industrial and commercial gas users across southwest Nigeria. That is why Viathan is an integrated energy company. We are all about providing reliable energy to our clients.

How does your IPP model add value for all involved players?
We work in partnership with a distribution company in Lagos to deliver power from our IPPs to various clients in the Lekki, Ikoyi and Marina areas. Given that we often have to build the last mile of infrastructure, we look to supply customers who have relatively high energy needs, normally in the range of 250 kW and above, to achieve an affordable unit cost power. Our clients benefit from significant cost savings. For a typical customer with a 50-50 split between grid supply and Viathan power, we estimate that our customers save at least 47% on their energy bill by choosing us. Furthermore, our customers enjoy a noiseless and pollution-free environment, compared with running a diesel generator.

Can your company’s power generation model be scaled to the rest of Nigeria?
We do believe that the decentralised power model is the way we achieve full electrification of Nigeria, and we have demonstrated by our track record that this is a feasible and sustainable path. Our customers enjoy 85% guaranteed electricity availability and, as of the last 12 months, we have sold out all of our IPP capacity in our Lekki plant, but we will install additional capacity to meet the rising demand. More customers will sign up for our power once they understand the value proposition. In recent months, spikes in the price of diesel to almost NGN 800 [USD 1.84] per litre have led many who use diesel for generation to seek affordable alternatives. In addition to being cost-effective, the power we deliver is gas-based, which reduces carbon emissions by as much as 47%. We have an expansive footprint across Nigeria, including Lagos, Oyo, Ogun and Kano, with new projects planned in Calabar, Delta and Abuja. Our geographic expansion is ongoing.

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