The Rural Electrification Agency (REA) has revealed that 15 universities across Nigeria have been fully connected to solar farms through its renewable energy intervention programmes.

The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the agency, Abba Aliyu, disclosed this during an interview on Channels Television’s The Morning Brief on Monday.

“We also have completed our interventions in the universities where we completed 15 universities as of today. All these universities now are fully connected with the solar farms,” Aliyu said.

According to him, the intervention forms part of the agency’s Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-up (DARES) project, which aims to expand electricity access across the country through renewable energy solutions.

Aliyu described DARES as the largest publicly funded renewable energy access project in the world, noting that it is expected to provide electricity to about 17.5 million Nigerians.

He said the project had attracted significant interest and participation from the private sector, contributing to its rapid expansion.

“Today, for the first time in the country, we are deploying more than 1,000 mini-grids nationwide. These include isolated mini-grids, while we have also been aggressive in the deployment of interconnected mini-grids,” he said.

The REA boss disclosed that the agency is currently working on 48 interconnected mini-grid projects across the country in collaboration with electricity distribution companies.

“We have been moving around the country conducting groundbreaking ceremonies and setting deployment targets of between six and eight months for all the interconnected mini-grids,” he added.

Aliyu also highlighted the agency’s efforts to attract private-sector financing into the renewable energy sector.

“We have convinced a number of Nigerian banks to support the sector, and we have signed several memoranda of understanding covering equipment financing, debt financing and bridge financing for private-sector operators,” he said.

On planning and implementation, Aliyu said the agency had completed a nationwide mapping exercise, the first of its kind in Nigeria, to guide the identification of areas requiring intervention.

According to him, the exercise enabled the agency to identify more than 750,000 communities across the country, providing critical data for the expansion of electricity access through renewable energy projects. (Channels TV)