Waltor Energy Corporate

At Waltor Energy Corporate, We provide an affordable smart-solar-community off grid for low and moderate income households in Nigeria.

We utilize solar photovoltaic technologies as a means of providing alternative to the epileptic national grid. 

Solar system works when sun light falls on a photovoltaic panel (solar panel) generating a direct current which is transfer to a battery using a charge controller; for the power to be useful for commercial purpose, an inverter is use to convert the direct current to alternating current.

In addition, we use iammeter monitoring technology for community project; to monitor customers electricity usage, calculate electricity monthly bill and monitor the energy flow of solar or wind turbine systems. The iammeter system uses wifi to upload client data and we track this data remotely using the mobile app and desktop site.

Nigeria faces enormous challenges with power generation for its constantly increasing population. This has affected 90% of 197 million people and every aspect of the economy; as the country has not been able to attain its full potential in every sector of the economy. 

According to a power sector white paper prepared by the Directors, CBO Capital Partners Limited, Mr. Chuka Mordi, and Mr. Bex Nnwawudu, which lend credence to GGI’s claim, said, “According to a recent research, Nigerians spend $9.2billion annually on diesel and petrol to fuel generating sets. Nigerian self generated power in 2019 amounted to 30.5GWh.”

Currently, 80% of 23 million people in Lagos state rely on diesel generators; the epileptic power supply has made 85% of small and medium scale enterprise to rely on standby generators; 61% of SMEs spend as much as 40% of its expenditure per day on fuel while an average family spends between 20-35% of its total income in a month on fuel, apart from the maintenance. This results in the consumption of approximately 162,000 liters of diesel consumed per day, producing 178lbs carbon emission per day.

The major factors contributing to this problem in my community are poor policy initiative, non-existing asset protection mechanism, poor maintenance culture, inadequate gas supply and poor town and urban planning.

Our market is made up of 23 million people in Lagos state and power deficits ranges from 9,000-10,000MW; 40% of the population lives in rural areas with no access to the national grid. People in this region maintain a purchasing power equivalent to about 70 percent of their annual income. 

Waltor's principal target market is families that earn at least $500-$1,000 per year. It is estimated that roughly one-third of Lagos households earn this amount or more, meaning that Waltor's primary target market in Lagos consists of about 7.5 million households. These target market are unable to experience 5-12 hours  power supply a day from the national grid, they spent huge part of their monthly income on running petrol generators.

We address our target market needs by, offering community solar off-grid power station, supplying constant electricity. Our services are affordable as we provide pay-as-you-use services using iammeter monitoring technology. Our service enable our target clients save up to 5-10% of their monthly capital they would have spent on diesel generators. Moreover, our solution will help reduce carbon emission by almost 20%.

In 2019, We identify the problem in the Nigeria energy market. Inorder to proffer a  sustainable solution, we had to understand the needs of the market; so we conducted a market feasibility study to ascertain the energy demand of users. We carried out a door to door survey, questioning about 93 potential customers about “the problem of the epileptic national grid and how it has affected their lives and business activities”.  We also ask questions like, “how much they spent daily to run their petrol generator”, “If they would prefer a better alternative to their petrol generator” and “what was their daily energy consumption”

According to the 93 potential customers who partake in our survey, we discovered that the energy consumed per day by 65% is between 2kWh-7kWh while the remaining 35% consumed as much as 8kWh to 30kWh. 

We were able to find out that an average family and business spent between $20-$150 per month on fuel to run their generator for about 5-12 hours per day; they also spent as much as $10-$100 per month to buy electricity from the national grid with an average daily power supply between 2-5 hours. 65% of those who took our survey disclosed to us that they are open to help from an organization providing alternative. 

In conclusion, it was with this information we use to develop a solution to meet the needs of our potential clients.

Waltor Energy Corporate is currently at the prototyping phase; we have carried out our feasibility study of the market in Lagos state, we have understood the market needs and have developed a working business model which afterwards, we made contact with a supplier of solar equipments in China. Our supplier gave us an estimated price of the materials we will need for executing our project. 

In June 2021, We purchased a 1kW solar system which we are independently using to test the viability of our proposed service. From the testing, our team has been able to use the iammeter app to monitor the overall efficiency of the solar system as well as making an estimated billing for energy consumed; from this testing, we are assured of accurate billing of clients based on their monthly energy consumption during community solar/wind turbine project. 

We rely on iammeter monitoring technology as the core component of our solar/wind turbine community project. The Iammeter (software) is a dedicated Energy Monitoring System, to which we can connect the Wi-Fi energy meters (hardware). The energy meter are two types; the single phase (WEM3080) and the three phase WiFi energy meter (WEM3080T). For our project, we are only interested in the single phase meter. 

The Single phase WiFi energy meter (WEM3080) is a bi-directional, WiFi module embedded electricity monitor; which measures the data, such as single-phase AC voltage, current, power etc, and transmits them to cloud via WiFi network.

We install this electric meter in every home under our community project and with WiFi connectivity this meters are individually connected to the online energy monitoring system-Iammeter (https://www.iammeter.com/) by one-key setup. With these, we can easily track, monitor and analyze customers energy consumption in their home in real-time. The meter can also help track the entire flow of the solar/wind turbine system. The system tells how much energy your solar/wind turbine system is producing, how much excessive energy are exporting to the customers home or how much their loads are consuming from the community grid. With open API, we can monitor the data locally via LAN or upload the data to our own server. The iammeter system also help in electricity bill calculation hourly/daily/monthly basis.

Our market is made up of 23 million people in Lagos state with about 40% of the population lives in rural areas with no access to the electricity grid. People in this region maintain a purchasing power equivalent to about 70 percent of their annual income. 

Waltor's principal target market is families that earn at least $500-$1,000 per year. It is estimated that roughly one-third of Lagos households earn this amount or more, meaning that Waltor's primary target market in Lagos consists of about 7.5 million households. As we launch our product within the next year, we expect to serve an average of 500-2,000 households; This will go up to a million homes within the next 3 years.

Our major goal is to establish a business that will provide quality affordable renewable energy solutions to at least 3 million homes and SMEs with 10-20 employed staffs by the year 2030.

Within the next year, we want to provide 24hours electricity supply to an average of 150 homes and small businesses across Lagos state; to achieve this, we plan on setting up a 50-200kW Solar/wind turbine community station in strategic locations across the state, seek partnership with real estate firms and investors to accelerate our market outreach.

Socially, we are impacting lives positively by reducing the over dependence of homes and small business on the epileptic national grid, improving the health and wellness of clients by reducing carbon emissions footprint in the environment, reducing and eradicating the use of petrol generators and increasing access to renewable energy. Customers will be able to save as much as 5-10% of the money they would have spent on buying petrols for their generators monthly. To achieve this mission, we will make sure our systems are affordable; and our services attractive and customer focused. For clients who want to own their own private systems but cannot afford to pay in full, we will provide installment payment plan up to 12 months.

We plan on using different indicators to track our environmental, social and economic objective. 

To determine the economic viability of our solar plant, we will use 4 indicators such as capital cost, replacement cost, maintenance cost and operation/generation cost to evaluate this objective. 

The objective relating to environmental impact requires indicators that measure greenhouse emissions produce by distributed generation/fossil fuel generators. 

We will use the greenhouse gas equivalency calculator developed by Arbox to compare how many tons of CO2 would have been emitted if a dirty technology produce electricity instead of a clean facility. We will also collect data from user to determine the “fossil energy saving;” yearly fossil fuel consumption before and after our smart grid solution will be measured. 

In order to evaluate the social impact of our smart grid project, we propose to have a measurement of 3 indicators such as; internet level - we will develop a specific link on the company website/social media accounts; the objective is to describe the project and its impact on the environmental aspects. To evaluate this, we will ratio between the number of visitors on the link and the number visitors on our company website and social media account. Job creation - We will also measure the number of direct/indirect jobs created during the lifetime of the installation (usually 20years). Energy bill - We will track the impact on customers energy bill before and after our smart grid.

The barriers we have identified toward the fulfillment of our goals within the next year are:

•  Social barrier - lack of understanding of benefit of solar PV and public resistance to chance for new technology. The barrier affect our market projection negatively.

• Financial barrier - Lack of access to capital, high interest rate, lack of import duties subsidies to support local renewable projects. At early stage of the project, we need incentives to encourage us. The barriers make it difficult to adopt and sustain due to financial constraints.

•  Legal barrier - non-integration of energy mix, non-participation of private sector. The barriers cause risk of uncertainty in support for solar projects, lobbies against renewable energies, and negative perception about the technology.

•  Market distortions - Trade barrier for new product/service, energy sector controlled, lack of access to diversified technology. The barriers cause hindrance to market penetration and hence new technology failed at some point.

Waltor Energy Corporate team is made up of two individuals; Williams Itsoko and Emmanuel Akogwu. 

Williams, who is the team lead and visionary founder. He has earned his Bachelor's degree in materials engineering from Enugu state university of science and technology in 2019. He has taken formal coursework in entrepreneurship from Bocconi university business school. He has 3 years of experience in the renewable energy sector and having had numerous exposures to the business aspect of solar community projects. 

Emmanuel has a degree in metallurgical engineering and he is an electrician with 3 years of work experience in the field. He is a trained technician in solar systems design and installation at school of renewable energy (NCEPU), China. His educational background and the fact that he lost his brother due to power failure at the hospital inspired him to work Williams on the best way to maximize impact with constant electricity supply. 

Williams grew up in a riverine community in Delta state with no access to the national grid. With this experience, him and his team member Emmanuel went on a outreach in his community distributing solar powered lamps to 50 rural dwellers.

Before coming up with the idea for a smart grid community project in Lagos state, they carried out a feasibility survey on small business owners. The survey revealed how greatly small businesses rely on petrol generators which has affected their cost of operations and overall effectiveness. 

Also, a Family they spoke to inform them about the challenges of sleeping with noisy generators at night, and how the use of archaic kerosene lamps affected them. These are just a few of the experiences that guided us in designing our systems.

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