The Vice Chancellor of University of Ibadan, Prof Kayode Adebowale, has reacted to the question of why the institution cannot utilise its engineering experts to generate power independently to serve its community, as well as the University College Hospital (UCH), instead of depending on the Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company (IBEDC), saying that “the cost of doing so is too huge.”
Asserting that plugging in to the national grid is much cheaper than even using other alternatives, the VC told New Telegraph that the thinking that any individual organisation can generate electricity for itself is only theoretical and not really practicable.
His words: “It is theoretical to say that you want to generate electricity. If you see the input that goes to electricity generation, you will see that not in any part of the world is such done.
Even outside the country where there are more developments, all you have to do is to just plug into the grid. The grid is always cheaper, and because you are providing it for a section, it makes it more difficult.
“That is why you see some companies are folding up and moving out. For you to generate your own electricity and make it sustainable, and to maintain it, is not an easy thing. You can’t run it. You can augment it with solar, inverter and all those ones.
Even if you use gas and so on, it is not sustainable. “If you consider the capital cost, as well as the maintenance cost that go into electricity generation, you will see that it is too huge for anyone to do.
In the University of Ibadan, we also have inverters that we use here, but it is just to augment. Even the IBEDC that we are talking about and connect directly, are just DisCos.
They are just distribution companies. They take what they have from the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), because they cannot generate electricity.
“Meanwhile, the University of Ibadan has taken additional stakes. We are really thinking because at our full load, the entire university consumes in the region of about 8 megawatts, which is quite huge.”
