Impact of a Web Based Crowdfunding Application for Renewable Energy Projects in Nigeria
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Energy crisis is one of the major challenges confronting African countries. Nigeria has a
growing energy demand, and about 70% of its citizens lack access to electricity, especially
in rural areas which constitute 60% of the population in the country that depends mainly on
fuel wood. The adoption of renewable energy systems as a viable alternative to solve the
energy crisis has been hampered by major challenges such as inadequacy,
unsustainability, and poor reliability. Access to credit and other financial services remains
limited, worsening these issues and hindering progress toward the provision of affordable
and clean energy. Hence, the thrust of this work is to develop a web application for
crowdfunding renewable energy projects in Nigeria. The purpose is to create a financial
technology in mobilizing funds from fellow citizens towards driving a stable electricity supply
to every location around the country. The crowdfunding application consists of a frontend
application built with react.js, a backend application built with node.js, databases, and a
payment system. Two case studies are considered and economically analyzed: a wind
turbine system and a wind-diesel hybrid system. The comparative analysis carried out
shows that, for the two case studies, the total cost of electricity (COE), simple payback
(SPB), and internal rate of return (IRR) are 12.89 /kWhand14.21/kWh, 161 years and
144 years, and 113.47% and 114.81%, respectively. Further, the sensitivity analysis results
reveal that it is more cost-effective to use the wind turbine system alone than the hybrid
configuration of wind and diesel.
Keywords
TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering