We’ve seen rural-rural migration into communities our projects are sited - Odunaiye

HAVENHILL SYNERGY Ltd is a clean-tech utility company that uses renewable (solar) energy to generate clean, safe, cost-effective and sustainable electricity in urban and rural areas in Nigeria. tells Businessday’s the company’s strategy in a competitive m

of the work. So we were able to transfer lessons gotten from the first project into practice and then we raised debt from outside Nigeria because what USDAF gave as additional funding couldn’t complete the second project.

So people we started business for some with N60,000 freezer and 20 thousand capital and today they are able to cater for their households. We have seen rural-rural migration into the communities where we have our electricity projects situated. you make N500,000 or N1 million and you make it in a number of places, you would see significant numbers but for us we run our company and pay salaries from our commercial projects. We don’t touch the revenue from our mini grids, we only use it to do the operation from our mini grid and save to service our loans but we believe that as we scale up we would see much improvement. The bottom-line is the cheaper your capital expenditure, the cheaper your tariff. If you build expensively, your tariff will be high and there is no way the community will pay. Here we don’t charge for construction in our company so the cost of our engineers we don’t put it on our projects especially when we have an obligation to an investor, our goal is to first of all, meet that obligation and then we can make profit afterward.

In Nigeria today you would find that tariff ranges N120 to N180 per kilowatt hour that’s where you find almost all developers but our own tarrif is between N120 and N140. We have never exceeded N140. I do not understand the way we think in Nigeria because if you go to other countries you would see that they have completely removed duty on the importation of solar products.

We can’t have a country that is producing 4,000-6,000 megawatt of power for 180 million people and then you have South Africa which produces 40,000-45,000 megawatts for 55 million people which is 15 times what Nigeria is producing and for a quarter of Nigeria’s population and then the government is discouraging people are trying to gear power through other source while claiming to be supporting local production.

People need to go to the rural area to appreciate the work being done in those areas. If you stay in the urban area and put 10 percent duty on panel, you would make your money because urban residents are making a killing in that sense. We won’t be deterred however by the failure of regulations.