Who is jae ireland

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Privacy Policy. Accept Reject. Chamber of Commerce , a vice chair and member of the Corporate Council on Africa , and the chairman of the U. He currently serves as a board member of the MasterCard Foundation, a charity dedicated to promoting youth employment in Africa.

Secretary of State for African Affairs. JAY IRELAND: The privatisation of the power sector is under way and moving in the right direction, but in terms of its impact on the final consumers, there is still a lot of work to be done. Power generation is still quite low when you compare the deficit between what is generated with the total potential and real demand. Generation of power is now deregulated. On the generation side, there is a huge shortfall between installed capacity and actual generation capacity.

This gap is due to a variety of reasons such as inadequate maintenance of facilities, vandalism of gas lines and cable lines, low funding of power stations, and obsolete equipment, among others. The transmission infrastructure as it exists today is woefully inadequate and would require significant investment to enable transmission of the power currently being generated and to increase capacity in the future. This sector would benefit greatly from development finance to overhaul the system and improve the flow of electricity to the end-user.

However, there are losses of revenue that could be fixed by a more adequate metering regime and discipline of collections. It is difficult to predict how long it will take to meet the power needs of Nigeria, but the efforts are certainly moving in the right direction. By fully utilising the stranded assets in generation, improving the return on investment in distribution and attracting significant investment to help overhaul the transmission system, Nigeria should be set to meet the demand for electricity.

What potential do you see for off-grid or distributed power in Africa, and how are you working towards off-grid solutions currently? Because the power is generated at or near the point of use, it gives users more options and flexibility to generate and control power when and where it is needed. A major benefit of off-grid energy is that it allows for a relatively short turnaround time and immediate impact for end-users. While pursuing long-term power solutions, distributed power provides a good short-term solution to meet electricity demand across Africa.

What sort of infrastructural adjustments are needed to better exploit resources for domestic power provision? Gas has to be priced appropriately to make projects more bankable and encourage investment in the sector. Other challenges facing private producers include the lack of significant funding, inadequate gas supply and lack of the project management capacity required to take large-scale power projects from start to finish.

Overall, there is work to be done across the entire power value chain, from fuel supply to generation, transmission and distribution.