By Cross Udo, Abuja
President Bola Tinubu has approved the North-East Development Commission (NEDC) deploying electric vehicles instead of Compressed Natural Gas (CNG).
The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of NEDC, Mohammed Alkali, disclosed this to State House correspondents yesterday after the commission presented to the president the best way to make e-vehicles functional and practical in the region.
The MD explained that the commission opted for e-vehicles instead of CNG-powered ones because the region lacks gas.
He said, “We are here today (Wednesday) to brief Mr President on one critical activity he has approved that we have had to engage in the last two months.
“As you can recall, there’s a directive from the President that cars as soon as possible should use CNG or electric vehicles, and we at the Northeast Development Commission did a thorough analysis of our region because we cover six states in Northeast Region, and look at the comparable advantage between CNG and e-vehicles.
“After our thorough analysis, we concluded that the CNG could work for the North-East region, but e-vehicles can work better for many reasons.
“One is that our plan, ultimately, is to create modular solar power units across the state that can be used to power this percentage of e-vehicles.
“On that note, earlier on, we sought and got approval from the presidency to go ahead and come up with the framework of how we will deploy this e-mobility in the northeast and what kind of e-mobility, etc.
“And Mr President graciously approved, and today we came to present to him the kind of E-vehicles we will introduce in the North-East.”
He further disclosed that the e-vehicles using power are in three categories.
He said, “There are three categories. One is the E-buses, which can carry about 40 people or passengers at a given time, at the minimum, and that’s for intrastate, not interstate. We also brought some samples of e-taxis, which generally will carry three passengers and the driver, and we also brought in a highly modified tricycle.
“Most of the tricycles we have in the North East or elsewhere only carry three people plus the driver four, but in our case, we have modified it to carry eight people plus the driver, and it’s fully covered and very convenient, and we are also, knowing the kind of weight and people we are going to carry, we’ve asked our engineers to modify the physical structure of the tricycle. Looking at it, you can see the tires are more significant, the prime is more extensive, and so forth.
“And also, in doing that, we consider local content that the body can be fabricated locally in the North East or elsewhere in the region.
“So today, we made a presentation to the President. And delightfully, the chairman is here, and Mr. President approved that we should go ahead and deploy the e-mobility in the North-East region.”
Fielding a question on why the e-vehicles, Alkali said, “You know, I told you earlier that when we started the whole process, we must engage ourselves in an in-depth analysis of what can work. Yes, there will be difficulties.
“For instance, if you talk about gas-powered CNG, the gas has to come from somewhere because we don’t have gas in the north for now. But for an e-vehicle, what you need is power. To power all e-facilities as part of the arrangement, we must establish comprehensive composite charging facilities for all our e-vehicles.
“This is already part of the work plan we are trying to do. In addition, we’re also considering establishing five or 10 KVA solar-powered grids stand-alone so that this can be backed up for the inadequacy of the power supplies.
“So, we are aware of all these challenges. But sometimes, with challenges come opportunities, and when we start, yes, we may have one more, two, three challenges in terms of power bank. Still, we already made a plan to see that, besides the usual generating plant, we are also going to back up some solar power grids stand-alone to power this station we are going to build.”
He further explained that the commission developed a comprehensive master plan in the past few years, which has been approved.
The master plan has 11 pillars covering all the economy’s sectors, from education to agriculture to commerce.
