The need for a sustainable environment by reducing harmful effects of climate change has been overturned by global debates, calling for an end to human activities that contribute to the depletion of the earth as well as the health of the people. This fight against earth depletion and its harmful effects is no longer bizarre; it?s about adopting measures to phase out fossil fuels and cutting the emission of greenhouse gasses while ensuring energy security.
Renewable Energy Programme is one of the many alternatives chosen to fight the menace of climate change. In achieving this there have been sensitization programmes and advocacy campaigns by different environmental rights groups and non-governmental organisations to aid the adoption of renewable energy. It is an international consensus that the economic and environmental consequences of climate change are not evenly felt. Those who pollute and those who suffer are usually not the same. The attention that is drawn to disaster is also influenced by the status of the society or country in which it happens.
The expert?s consensus is that this fundamental shift in the way energy is consumed and generated must begin immediately and be well underway within the next 10 years in order to avert the worst impacts of climate change. The scale of the challenge requires a complete transformation of the way we produce, consume and distribute energy, while maintaining economic growth.
It is in line with this that the world and the international global regime has decided to respond by trying to put some measures in place and to do resource efficiency management to control the way the capital energy is used and the best measures to use in sustaining the environment. This development led the Federal Ministry of Environment to put together the Renewable Energy Master Plan for Nigeria, initiated to fulfill its obligation as part of the African strategy on emission reduction and to address the challenges of moving towards clean, reliable, secure and competitive energy supply, which is long overdue.
Renewable energy is energy generated from natural resources such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides and geothermal heat and can be replenished.
The Renewable Energy Master Plan in the country shows renewable energy can directly contribute to poverty alleviation by providing the energy needed for businesses and employment.
Renewable energy technologies can also make indirect contributions to alleviating poverty by providing energy for cooking, space heating, lighting and contributing to education by providing electricity to schools. The renewable energy programme, which began in Nigeria in February 2012 was formally launched in Abuja recently under the supervision of Arc. Darius Ishaku, the Supervising Minister of Environment but it is yet to get the legislation to enable the programme assume the status of an agency.
In its bid to cut down on energy poverty, reduce the congestion on the national grid and improve the health of the people in line with achieving its set objectives under the renewable energy programme, the ministry also unveiled a programme tagged Rural Women Energy Security (RUWES). Arc. Ishaku said the project initiated by the Renewable Energy Programme of the Federal Ministry of Environment is targeted at under-served rural women with the aim of ensuring affordable and sustainable clean energy access to the rural poor.
Ishaku said that evidence suggests that widespread deployment of clean cooking stoves and solar lighting systems under the RUWES project with energy and combustion efficiency are improvements over traditional dirty fuel sources, which could also potentially help lessen adverse effect on human health, energy poverty, time and income savings and climate consequences. He said it would also reduce black carbon emission by phasing out single-wick kerosene lighting and oily lamp through the introduction of small off grid lighting systems that use light emitting diodes (LEDS) and provision of household stand- alone solar solutions.