How Nigerians can generate their own electricity with Solar energy

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Posted by on Saturday June 11, 2016 at 21:51:32:

Are you living in Nigeria? How much was your last electricity bill? Do you know you can avoid having to pay those bills on a monthly or yearly basis? You can actually go a bit further and stop paying those bills entirely. Yes, you can live without NEPA, PHCN or any other power company that rises up in the future. You can generate your own electricity if you are in Nigeria thanks to power from a natural source called the sun.

The sun gives us solar energy and that energy can be converted to electricity using solar panels and it will be able to power those same things that our old school electricity can power. You can power your TV, fridge, pressing iron, microwave, satellite decoder, bulbs and so on using solar energy.

The 2 basic things every Nigerian needs in order to produce his/her own electricity and those are: Solar panels and a deep cycle battery.

There are many companies and merchants now in Nigeria that sell solar panels and batteries that they can work with and you can even buy a complete solar power generator from them which provides you with all the basic things depending on how much power you need e.g. 3 KWH. The other important device needed in a solar power generator is an inverter but it's not necessary if your electronic device can work with Direct Current(D.C.). An inverter is mostly needed for those home or office appliances that require Alternating Current(A.C.) and this is common for most electronic devices that we own.

You have to first calculate how much power you really need for your home and the easy way to find out is by taking a look at your electricity meter when there is electricity and record the power consumed in 1 hr. Multiply the 1 hr by 24 to know how much power you need per day. It could be something like 30 kWh and for 30 days, that would be 900 kWh.

The next thing is to setup a solar power plant that can generate at least 30 kwh per day for you. One you set that up, you no longer need to be paying electricity bills other than the money you've already invested in the solar plant. A solar power system that is setup without being connected to the grid(off the grid) saves you money since you would no longer need electricity supply from an outside source like NEPA.

You can get in touch with a solar power company to set up a 30 kWh or lower solar power plant for you or you can do it yourself.

Let's assume you want to set it yourself, we need to consider the number of hours you get sunlight per day e.g. 5 hrs. Since we need 30 kwh or 30,000 Watt-Hours per day, this means we need a solar panel that can generate at last 30000 Watts for the few 5 hrs of sunlight we have per day and that implies 6000 Watts per hour. We can make use of 40 units of 150 Watts solar panel or 30 units of 200 Watts solar panels.

The next step is to get a deep cycle battery that can store the entire 30000 Watts generated by the Solar panel and for this, a 2500Ah battery will be ok. It should be a battery capable of storing 30,000 Watts and a 2500 Ah 12V or 1250 Ah 24V battery can do it. Since it's hard to find batteries that are up to 2500Ah in the market, we can make use of 25 units of 100Ah. We can also make it higher such as by using 20 units of 150Ah 12V batteries to get a 3000Ah power bank for storing electricity generated by the panels.

The next step is to include the inverters(If AC power is required), solar charge controller and connecting cables.

With the above setup, you can generate a 30 kwH solar power system that can power your home or office with at most 30000 Watts per day.