The Lagos government said it planned to deploy renewable energy in public facilities in the transportation, health, and educational sectors, among others.
The Babajide Sanwo-Olu-led administration intends to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy before 2030, according to the Commissioner for Energy and Mineral Resources, Olalere Odusote, who made this announcement on Wednesday at a two-day workshop on Lagos urban power design sprint in Ikeja, the state capital.
According to Odusote, the action was taken as part of the administration’s objectives to transition to an economy based on renewable energy, which was in line with the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.
“The Lagos state government is committed to green energy transition and ensuring universal access to clean, affordable, and reliable energy in the state. This is evident in the various policies and strategies aimed at creating an enabling environment for the proliferation of renewable energy technologies,” Odusote said.
Earlier, R-Cities Network’s Regional Director for Africa, Dana Omran, said the organisation looked forward to projects that experts gathered by the state’s resilience office would put together to uptake renewable energies for the state. He said education and health remained critical sectors that would immensely benefit from the initiative.
He stated that last year, R-cities Network invited Lagos to join them and three other cities in the green and equitable recovery program, which intended to assist members of its worldwide network in speeding the equitable energy transition through efforts to develop resilience. Cali, Columbia, Cape Town, South Africa, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil are three additional cities that are currently members of the programme.
The workshop was the culmination of years of partnership between the Lagos State government through the resilience office and the Resilient Cities Network, according to Lagos Chief Resilience Officer, Dr. Folayinka Dania.
She said, “Over the next two days we will be working together to explore opportunities that will unlock innovation in renewable energy technology development with a focus on private sector involvement to support Lagos’ manufacturing and technical capacity to support renewable energy.”
