By :Charlotte Cosset
“ Everyone sees the problem, but it’s hard for people to imagine that there’s a solution,” Bimbola Adisa observed. So, he decided to take the bull by the horns about fifteen years ago. One of the major problems on the continent is the loss of kilowatt hours produced. “ We know that about 35% of production is lost. So we created a system that allows us to know where this 35% goes,” he explains. Because on the continent, population growth and the lack of information on the ground complicate the task. “ We don’t have a good map of the urban layout or addresses. In the event of a power outage, we don’t even know where to look. So we created a very, very basic map that shows every building, every pole, every transformer. So, in the event of a power outage, you know exactly where you have to go to get it repaired,” explains the entrepreneur.
His solution has already been successfully tested in Nigeria and Ghana, he highlights, assuring that power losses have gone from 35% to 20%. ” As a result, the electricity services are more efficient, and therefore, they can recover revenues and reinvest in the network, Bimbola Adisa was able to observe. If they are not efficient, they cannot replace their equipment, they cannot reinvest, and the service ends up degrading. In Ghana, revenues have increased by almost 70%, losses on the network have been reduced, and the electricity supply is simply more stable. “
Developing a profitable ecosystem
Proparco, a subsidiary of AFD, has taken a stake in the latest fundraising for the Nigerian start-up Beacon Power Services. Electrification is one of its priorities, and its need is enormous. A sector that nevertheless attracts few confirms Jean Benoît du Chalard, head of investment at Proparco. ” It is difficult for many reasons. The first is that everything related to energy generally requires a lot of capital. These are very large sums that must be deployed, especially to make up for a delay,” he emphasizes. Investments are needed in various forms for additional electrical capacities, for a change of equipment generation, for innovative solutions, for the improvement of networks, or for the development of electrification in rural areas.
” It’s an entire ecosystem, if you will, on which it is appropriate to intervene in a coherent, complementary way, to be as effective as possible,” insists Jean Benoît du Chalard. The fear of investing in a sector that is not very profitable, or even loss-making, can also scare investors. ” Yes, of course, but we also have counter-examples of projects that generate a certain profitability in this sector,” assures the expert. ” The question is certainly that of the overall financial balance of the electricity sectors. ” And with the Beacon Power Services project, Proparco is convinced that it holds one of the keys to the solution.
Beacon Power Services hopes to expand its activities to six new countries soon. Bimbola Adisa is working on a new version of its software, using drones and artificial intelligence in particular, in order to move from a simple monitoring system to a control system capable of remotely redirecting electrical flows.
