President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has approved the deployment of e-vehicles in the Northeast region to ease mobility and reduce transportation fares across the States.
The President gave the approval on Wednesday at the State House, Abuja, when he received the leadership of the Northeast Development Commission NEDC, led by Mohammed Alkali, the commission’s CEO/Managing Director.
Alkali told State House Correspondents that the Commission, following a thorough analysis of the comparative advantage of Compressed Natural gas-powered vehicles in the region, the NEDC, concluded on the deployment of e-vehicles across the six States of the region.
The MD/CEO of NEDC hinted that the Commission as part of its plans intends to create modular solar power units across the states.
This, he emphasised would serve as a standby power source for the e-vehicles in case of electricity power outage.
“In addition, we’re also considering establishing five KVA or 10 KVA solar-powered grid, stand-alone, so that this can be backup for the inadequacy of the power supplies, so we’re aware of all these challenges, but sometimes with challenges come opportunities. When we start, yes, we may have one or two challenges, but we already made a plan to see that besides the usual generating plant, we are also going to back up with some stand-alone solar power grid to power this station we are going to build”.
He added that this would be used to power a certain percentage of the e-vehicles when deployed.
“As you can recall the directive of the President that cars as far as, we should use, CNG or electric vehicles.
“And we at the development commission did a total analysis of our region, because we covered six states in those regions, and we looked at the comparative advantage between CNG and e-vehicles.
“After our total analysis, we concluded that for the northeast region yes the CNG can work, but e-vehicles can work better for many reasons. One is that our plan at the end of the day is to create modular solar power units across the state, which can be used to power this percentage of e-vehicles.” He added.
Alkali identified e-buses, e-tricycles and e-taxes as categories of e-mobility to be deployed in the Northeast states.
He explained that the e-buses intended to run intra-state movements are designed to have a minimum of 40 people carrying capacity per time.
The MD/CEO of NEDC disclosed that the Commission presented samples of e-taxes and highly modified e-tricycles to the President.
There are three categories. One is the e-buses, which can carry about 40 people or passengers at a given point in time at the minimum, and that’s it for intrastate, not inter-state. And also brought some samples of taxes, which can carry three people, a private passenger plus a driver. And we also brought in a highly modified tricycle.
Most of the tricycles we have in the Northeast or elsewhere only carry three people and driver four, but in our case, we have modified it to carry eight people as a driver, and it’s fully covered and very convenient.
“We also knowing the kind of weight and people who are going to carry were asked our engineer to modify the piece of structure of the tricycle. When you look at it after, you can see the tires are bigger, the prime is bigger, and so on. And also in doing that”
Alkali added that the Commission has considered local content that the fabrication can communicate locally in the North East and somewhere else in the region.
He noted that plans are underway to back initial plans with a 10KVA solar power grid that would supply electricity, to support the e-mobility when finally deployed
“We have already made a plan to back up with solar power grid stand alone.
Speaking on the potential of the Northeast, Alkali said the commission has developed comprehensive master plans that cover 11pillars that will fully activate the action plan for the initiative.
The MD/CEO of NEDC further made known that the Commission will engage stakeholders, especially the road transport workers thereby integrating their concerns and advice before the final stage of activating the e-vehicles across the Northeast states of Nigeria.
“we will engage stakeholders, especially road transport workers to integrate their concerns and advice,” Alkali added.
Dominica Nwabufo
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