Waltor Energy Corp.

We provide affordable and constant electricity service to people without access to the national grid using smart off-grid community solar station.

Nigeria faces enormous challenges with power generation for its constantly increasing population. This has affected 90% of 200 million people and every aspect of the economy. About 56.5% of Nigeria's population is connected to the national grid, receiving erratic and irregular electricity supply [1]. Therefore, about 45% (~90,000,000) do not have access to the national electricity grid, and about 80% of the population which lacks access to the national grid lives in rural communities [1].

According to a power sector white paper prepared by the Directors, CBO Capital Partners Limited, Mr. Chuka Mordi, and Mr. Bex Nnwawudu, which lend credence to GGI’s claim, said, “According to a recent research, Nigerians spend $9.2billion annually on diesel and petrol to fuel generating sets. Nigerian self generated power in 2019 amounted to 30.5GWh.” This has placed Nigeria as the highest user of generators globally, with more than 60 million households having their generators, making the country the highest importer of generators in the world [2]. Nigerians are buying the generators, regardless of the negative implications they might cause. In 2016, about 61,664.272kt CO2 was emitted from liquid fuel consumption, about 121.011kt CO2 was emitted from solid fuel consumption, and about 31,862.563kt CO2 from gaseous fuel consumption [3]. These emissions are mainly from the industrial and residential application of fossil-fuelled generators to complement the energy supply. [4] stated that the continuous release and emission of anthropogenic pollution from fossil-fuelled generators contributes to climate change.

Currently, 80% of 23 million people in Lagos state rely on petrol generators; the epileptic power supply has made 85% of small and medium scale enterprise to rely on standby generators; 61% of SMEs spend as much as 40% of its expenditure per day on fuel while an average family spends between 20-35% of its total income in a month on fuel, apart from the maintenance. This results in the consumption of approximately 162,000 liters of diesel consumed per day, producing 178lbs carbon emission per day.

The major factors contributing to the problem of epileptic power supply in my community are poor policy initiative, non-existing asset protection mechanism, poor maintenance culture, inadequate gas supply and poor town and urban planning. The major factor that has declined reliability on renewable energy source is the fact that energy storage (battery) is expensive and transient.

Reference:

[1] World-Bank-Group. (2020). Access to electricity (% of population) - Nigeria. Retrieved from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.ACCS.ZS?locations=NG&view=chart

[2] Ayodele, T. R., & Ogunjuyigbe, A. S. O. (2015). Increasing household solar energy penetration through load partitioning based on quality of life: The case study of Nigeria. Sustainable Cities and Society, 18(2015),21–31.

[3] WorldBank. (2017c). Methane emissions in the energy sector (thousand metric tons of CO2 equivalent). Retrieved from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.METH.EG.KT.CE?end=2008&locat  ions=NG-GB-ZA-IN-AE&start=1969

[4] Akinyele, D. O., Rayudu, R. K., & Nair, N. K. C. (2017). Life cycle impact assessment of photovoltaic power generation from crystalline silicon-based solar modules in Nigeria. Renewable Energy, 101(2017),537–549

Our solution relies on the use of renewable energy source to meet the energy demands of Nigerians; but when it comes to energy storage, we use water and air as batteries instead of contemporary lithium or acid batteries that are expensive and transient in the long term. There are different components of our system like solar farm, underground water reservoir, turbine sump, pump, compressor, compressed-air storage tank and the control room and the technological processes involved are the charging, discharging and monitoring process.

The charging process starts when the sun hits the solar panels that generate direct current that is then converted to alternating current to power a water pump. We then pump water from the reservoir to compress the air inside the compression tanks. The compressed air is delivered to the underground tank for storage.

When energy is in demand, the discharging process starts; the compressed air is released from the storage tank, back to the compression chamber. The compressed air is used to push water, the same water that is used for the air compression through a hydroelectric turbine and electricity is generated.

In addition, we use iammeter monitoring technology for community project; to monitor customers' electricity usage, calculate electricity monthly bill and monitor the energy flow of solar or wind turbine systems. The iammeter system uses Wi-Fi to upload client data and we track this data remotely using the mobile app and desktop site.

Population in Lagos State is estimated at 23 million people and power deficits range from 9,000-10,000MW; 40% of the population lives in rural areas with no access to the national grid. People in this region maintain a purchasing power equivalent to about 70 percent of their annual income.

Our principal target market is families that earn at least $500-$1,000 per year. It is estimated that roughly one-third of Lagos households earn this amount or more, meaning that Waltor's primary target market in Lagos consists of about 7.5 million households. These target markets are unable to experience 8-12 hours power supply a day from the national grid to power their home and business. They spent huge part of their monthly income on running petrol generators that has indirectly impacted the price of service rendering and traded commodities in the market, especially perishable produce that needs refrigeration.

We address our target market needs by offering community solar off-grid power station, supplying 24 hours per day of electricity; this will enable us promote the use of renewable energy source and increase awareness by 60 percent in Lagos State. In this case, families and business who cannot afford their own system can simply join our energy community. We provide pay-as-you-use services using iammeter monitoring technology that brings credibility and moderate billing of clients. We utilize air-battery technology for energy storage, making our service affordable and reliable because air-battery can be used for up to 50 years without carrying out maintenance on it. Our service enables our target clients save up to 5-10% of their monthly capital they would have spent on diesel generators. Moreover, our solution will help reduce carbon emission by almost 20% and it doesn't generate any greenhouse gas emissions, neither does it cause any harm or pollution to the environment.

Currently, the team behind W.E. Corp is made up of Shola Itsoko (team lead), Emmanuel Akogwu, Shadrach Ifeanyi and Williams Itsoko; all of which are well-positioned to deliver the required energy demands for our clients. 

Our team lead, Shola Itsoko is a climate activist and green technology advocate who has been promoting the importance of a greener economy. He has developed an excellent relationship with rural dwellers, particularly around Benin city in Edo state Nigeria, by constantly engaging with them asking questions and support in his little way; He has investigated how the lack of access to the national grid results to shortage of drinking water in the community and firewood effects on the health of women and children. 

Williams is the elder brother to Stephen; he has over 5 years experience in entrepreneurship and business development and he is in charge of the design of innovative solutions, business plan and model development, feasibility study and market analysis. He grows up in a riverine community at the creek of Delta State and has first-hand experience of the damages not been connected to the grid.

Emmanuel, on the other hand, is a trained technician in solar systems design and installation at the school of renewable energy (NCEPU), China. He has over 4 years' experience working with key renewable energy providers in Nigeria like Genesis Energy Holdings and Greenage Technologies Power Systems Limited and he is our key expert in solar system and wind turbine installation and electrical works. His educational background, skills and the fact that he lost his brother due to power failure at a hospital inspired him to work with the W.E. Corp team on the best way to maximize impact with constant electricity supply. 

Shadrach is an engineer with over 8 years in the use of AutoCAD and many other computer design softwares; He's our lead computer engineer and graphics designer.

Before coming up with the idea for a smart grid community project in Lagos state, they carried out a feasibility survey on low-income households and small business owners. The survey revealed how greatly small businesses rely on petrol generators, which has affected their cost of operations and overall effectiveness. 
Also, a family they spoke to inform them about the challenges of sleeping with noisy generators at night, and how the use of archaic kerosene lamps affected them. These are just a few of the experiences that guided us in designing our systems. 

Generally, our team is dedicated, committed and passionate to promoting the use of renewable energy solutions across Nigeria. We believe that together W.E. can drive for a more sustainable future of zero carbon emissions and we embedded it into our slogan "Energy for sustainable growth."

In 2019, we identify the problem in the Nigeria energy market. In order to proffer a sustainable solution, we had to understand the needs of the market; so we conducted a market feasibility study to ascertain the energy demand of users. We carried out a door-to-door survey, questioning about 93 potential customers about the problem of the epileptic national grid and how it has affected their lives and business activities. We asked questions like, “how much they spent daily to run their petrol generator”, “If they would prefer a better alternative to their petrol generator” and “what was their daily energy consumption”

According to the 93 potential customers who partake in our survey in 2020, we discovered that the energy consumed per day by 65% is between 2kWh-7kWh while the remaining 35% consumed as much as 8kWh to 30kWh. We were able to find out that an average family and business spent between $20-$150 per month on fuel to run their generator for about 5-12 hours per day; they also spent as much as $10-$100 per month to buy electricity from the national grid with an average daily power supply between 2-5 hours. 65% of those who took our survey disclosed to us that they are open to help from an organization providing an alternative. 

After gathering information from our potential client, we did some paperwork on our design model for our smart energy grid and reached out to renewable energy equipment suppliers from China to ascertain the cost of the equipment. After getting invoice from suppliers, we estimated that a sum of 125,000 USD is required for a 90KWh system for 24hour per day. Due to lack of funding, we have not been able to advance with the development of a standard prototype and engaging potential client for review.

Previously, Emmanuel - a member of our team has worked with key players in the renewable energy industry like Genesis Energy Holdings and Greenage Technologies Power Systems Limited; who are trying to solve this problem in their own way.

Over the years, hydropower and gas-turbine have been the major trend for electricity generation for the national grid; whereas off-grid homes and businesses use petrol/diesel generator to produce electricity in Nigeria. We are aware that 40% of the country's population is off-grid users relying on petrol generators and these machines come with high maintenance costs, health and environment hazards.

Nigeria receives large amount of sunlight all year round, making solar energy a suitable alternative. In Lagos alone, there is an average of 1885 hours of sunlight per year (of a possible 4383) with an average of 5:09 of sunlight per day, that is about 43% of daylight hours. The remaining 57% of daylight hours are likely cloudy or with shade, haze or low sun intensity. At midday, the sun is on average 74.6° above the horizon (according to one estimate).

The major problem with renewable energy is energy storage; lithium and deep-cell batteries are expensive and transient and what we are trying to do differently is to use some of Earth's abundance resources to store energy. This technology is innovative and only uses water and air to store energy at high capacity for a long duration in a safe and cost effective manner. The sun is used to power water pump; the water flows into the compression tank pressing the air at high pressure through an isothermal process with no heat lost, when energy is in demand the compressed air is used to push water, the same water that is used for the air compression through a hydro-electric turbine and electricity is generated with up to 80% of energy round efficiency. 

This technology has the potential to disrupt the Nigeria's energy market because while today most commonly energy storage technology solutions relies on lithium batteries which has significant environmental impact and techno-economic limitations, our air-batteries can run endless circles for decades (up to 50 years) with no degradation at minimum expense. Take, for example, a community with 900kW of electricity loads will require 9,500 batteries (12v 200Ah power rating) for a 24hours per day of electricity whereas for our air-battery we just need a tank volume of 18,000 cubic meters equivalent to a land space of 2,400 square meters. Moreover, setting up our plant comes at a 40% less cost than contemporary solar plants. This means that our service will be affordable, durable and sustainable; we will be able to set-up our energy farm rapidly in every community without access to the national grid and remotely monitor the conditions of our plant's internal and external performance like radiance of the sun, system output, inverter performance and energy consumption using iammeter technology.

Our major goal is to establish a business that will provide quality affordable renewable energy solutions to at least 3 million homes and SMEs with 10-20 employed staffs by the year 2030. Within the next year, we want to provide 24hours electricity supply to an average of 150-5,000 homes and small businesses across Lagos state; to achieve this, we plan on setting up a 100kW to 1MW solar community station in strategic locations across the state. 

Socially, we want to impact lives positively by reducing the over dependence of homes and small business on the epileptic national grid, improving the health and wellness of clients by reducing carbon emissions footprint in the environment, reducing and eradicating the use of petrol generators and increasing access to renewable energy. Customers will be able to save as much as 5-10% of the money they would have spent on buying petrols for their generators monthly.

To achieve our goals, we will make sure our service are affordable, attractive and customer focused, organise community gatherings where we will educate people on the danger pose by greenhouse gas and health hazard of petrol generator, seek partnership with real estate firms to power their house, reach out to both national and international investors to accelerate our market outreach. We hope to form a strategic partnership with Augwind Energy Technology Company; they have one of the most affordable and efficient air battery technology in the market. We will purchase our solar panels and inverters from Tanfon Solar in China and the construction of the water reservoir and assembling of every system will be done by local engineers. We will also employ the use of word-of-mouth, billboard and advertising on local media to reach out to more market and clients.

Our solution is divided into 3 components (charging, discharging and monitoring) that rely on existing technologies. Both charging and discharging process depend on sun, air and water in order to function. The charging process starts when the sun hits the solar panels that generate direct current that is then converted to alternating current to power a water pump. Water is pumped from the reservoir to compress the air inside the compression tanks. The compressed air is delivered to the underground tank for storage. When energy is in demand, the discharging process starts; the compressed air is released from the storage tank, back to the compression chamber. The compressed air is used to push water, the same water that is used for the air compression through a hydroelectric turbine and electricity is generated.

For the system monitoring process, we rely on iammeter technology as the core component of our solar community project. The Iammeter (software) is a dedicated Energy Monitoring System, to which we can connect the Wi-Fi energy meters (hardware). The energy meter is two types; the single phase (WEM3080) and the three phase Wi-Fi energy meter (WEM3080T). For our project, we are only interested in the single-phase meter.

The Single phase Wi-Fi energy meter (WEM3080) is a bi-directional, Wi-Fi module embedded electricity monitor; which measures the data, such as single-phase AC voltage, current, power etc, and transmits them to the cloud via a Wi-Fi network.

We will install this electric meter in every home under our community project and with Wi-Fi connectivity, these meters are individually connected to the online energy monitoring system-Iammeter (https://www.iammeter.com/) by one-key setup. With these, we can easily track, monitor and analyze customers' energy consumption in their home in real-time. The meter can also help track the entire flow of the solar system. The system tells how much energy our solar farm produce, how much excessive energy is exporting to the customers' home or how much their loads are consuming from the community grid. With open API, we can monitor the data locally via LAN or upload the data to our own server. The iammeter system also helps in electricity bill calculation hourly/daily/monthly basis.

We are yet to lunch our service but our market is made up of 23 million people in Lagos state with about 40% of the population living in rural areas with no access to the electricity grid. People in this region maintain a purchasing power equivalent to about 70 percent of their annual income. 

Our principal target market is families that earn at least $500-$1,000 per year. It is estimated that roughly one-third of Lagos households earn this amount or more, meaning that our primary target market in Lagos consists of about 7.5 million households. We hope to meaningfully and sustainably impact the lives of 500-2,000 households and businesses within our first year of lunch; this will grow up to a million customers within the next 3 years.

The barriers we have identified toward the fulfillment of our goals within the next year are:

• Social barrier - lack of understanding of the benefits of solar PV and public resistance to chance for new technology. The barrier affects our market projection negatively. To mitigate this obstacle, we will greatly invest in our marketing campaign like organising community gatherings, billboard advertisement in public spaces and encouraging word-of-mouth to reach remote places.

• Financial barrier - Lack of access to capital and lack of import duties subsidies to support local renewable projects. At the early stage of the project, we need incentives to encourage us. The barriers make it difficult to adopt and sustain due to financial constraints. Once we have been able to set-up our first community solar project, we will carry out intense promotional campaign on social media and reach out to international investors and ventures that support green technology; this will provide us with enough funding to expand our customers base rapidly.

• Legal barrier - non-integration of energy mix and power generation limit for small and medium business. The barriers cause risk of uncertainty in support of solar projects, lobbies against renewable energies, and negative perception about the technology. We will meet with critical stakeholders in the Nigeria energy market as well as government agencies to find a common ground on the 1MW electricity generation limit set aside for small business, etc.

Our value preposition is that we sell affordable and clean 24 hours per day of electricity to an off-grid community in Nigeria through a pay-as-you-use service. Our primary target is households and business that earns at least $500-$1000 per day. People who depend on electricity for their daily activities; which is estimated at 7.5 million potential customers in Lagos. We estimate that we will directly impact between 200-700 households and business in our first year of incorporation. At the end of each year, our customers are projected to save at least 20-30% of the money they would have used on petrol generators. Our revenue streams are; monthly fees from off-grid users which makes 70% of our total revenue source, 15% from government and real estate contracts, 10% sales of solar kits and 5% grants, loan and donations. Our plan is to invest our profits into the expansion of our service in many other communities, marketing and platform development. Our channel of reaching users is through direct outside sales/marketer force, call center, channel partner network and customer referral program or encouraging word-of-mouth. Our cost structure is installation and maintenance of solar farm, design of energy-efficient solutions and staffing. Innovative technology, real time software for energy evaluation and human resources make up our key resources. Our key activities include maintenance of solar farm and electricity production and distribution, communication and marketing and energy advisory. Key partners include Augwind Energy Technology Company, Tanfon Solar Ltd., and master contractual agreement with major suppliers.

Achieving financial sustainability is a long-term goal that requires the concerted efforts of our entire team. At the initial stage of our community project, access to grant, prize money and angel investment is a competitive advantage, but we cannot rely exclusively on such privilege to reach our goal. If we were to do so, we would be allowing luck to determine our fate.

We will sell electricity generated in our solar farm to low and middle-income earners through pay-as-you-use service. While we make a 50-100% profit each year, we will reinvest all profit made within the next 5years. With this strategic plan, we will maintain a reliable recurring revenue stream to cover expenses, achieving our financial results and impact goals that are consistent with the expectations of our organization.

Moreover, after 5 years been financial sustainable and achieving our milestones, we will opt to raising investment capital through venture capitals to expand our market outreach into other areas like providing power to residential real estate, government buildings, big institutions and other underdeveloped communities that will need our services. We will build an excellent reputation for ourselves while fostering a relationship with the Nigeria's federal and state government; we will use our influence to attract government contracts like street solar project and other areas.