ALTERNATIVE POWER GENERATION; A REVIEW OF RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES IN NIGERIA

In Nigeria, more than half of its estimated 210 million people have no access to electricity and the areas connected to electricity grid have constantly witnessed frequent and prolonged outages, surges, and load shedding of power supply. These are attributable to insufficient generation, inadequate and poor transmission/distribution infrastructures. Consequently, many households and business owners have to rely entirely on expensive and environmentally harmful diesel/petrol generators to meet their electricity demands. This paper presents a review of literature on Nigeria's renewable energy potentials for alternative power generation, highlights the power sector policies and reforms since 2001 aimed at boosting electricity access, and the integration of renewable energy resources n the energy options. The research trends on renewable energy hybridization for power generation, the major renewable power system projects, and the key drivers and challenges of renewable energy utilization to meet electricity demands in Nigeria are also highlighted in this paper. The findings revealed that solar, wind, small hydro, and biomass resources are in abundance in Nigeria, and if fully harnessed can generate about 1,182.4 GWh of energy per day. More attention has been given to research on renewable-based rural electrification with an emphasis on the hybrid solar photovoltaic-diesel generator and hybrid solar photovoltaic-wind-diesel generator. In line with the National Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Policy (NREEEP), there is the need to adopt renewable energy as an alternative/supplementary energy generating sources and develop implementable framework to integrate the solar, wind, biomass, and small hydro schemes in the energy mix, in order to end the age-long energy crisis in Nigeria and allow for a greater percentage of the Nigerian Population to have access to electricity.