Distributed Energy System in Nigeria: Potentials, Technologies, Benefits and Challenges

Nigeria is naturally endowed with renewable and non-renewable energy resources that can be used to generate power to meet the energy needs of the population. Despite this potential, the country is faced with a lot of challenges to develop the power sector. These challenges include network losses, inadequate funding to develop the transmission system, right of way issues to build transmission lines, environmental and social concerns. Consequently, distributed energy system (DES) has been identified as an efficient way of addressing some of these challenge by generating power close to the customer's load. This paper presents the different DES technologies and potential energy resources available in Nigeria as well as the benefits and challenges associated with integrating distributed energy system to the power grid.