Powering West Africa's Trade: The 15 MWp Sabon Gari Market Hybrid Plant, Kano

Solar & Storage · Project Record

Powering West Africa’s Trade: The 15 MWp Sabon Gari Market Hybrid Plant, Kano

International Consolidated Contractors Offshore SAL Ltd  |  Kano State, Nigeria  |  Nigeria Electrification Project

International Consolidated Contractors Offshore SAL Ltd designed, supplied, installed, tested and commissioned a 15 MWp hybrid solar power plant electrifying Sabon Gari Market in Kano State. The Rural Electrification Agency, under the Nigeria Electrification Project, certified that the plant entered commercial use on 6 June 2023, for a total contract value of US$21,626,632.83. The contract was awarded on 4 October 2022 under reference REA-NEP/D/GO/RFP/108/29E, following proposals submitted on 10 August 2022, and the Agency issued its certificate on 16 July 2023. Unlike a conventional solar farm, this installation was built to serve a defined commercial load: the traders, workshops and storage operations of one of northern Nigeria’s principal markets.

1Scope Delivered

Component	Specification
Solar PV	15 MWp hybrid solar power system
Battery storage	15 MW / 15 MWh lithium-ion, with full Energy Management Systems
Backup generation	Synchronised diesel generators, 14 sets of 1,100 kVA, covering peak demand of 7,500 kW
Distribution works	Installation and rehabilitation of existing streetlights and transmission system cabling
Supervisory system	Advanced Metering Infrastructure and SCADA, with continuous live monitoring
Operations	15-year operation and maintenance commitment, including all projected spare parts

The 15 MWp hybrid plant built to serve a defined commercial load — IMG-1

2The Three-Layer Architecture

Solar generates when the sun is up. The battery holds that energy and releases it into the evening and through cloud cover. The synchronised diesel sets stand behind both, sized to cover the market’s full peak demand independently. For a trading environment, that redundancy is the point: a market does not tolerate an outage gracefully, and a system with a single point of failure would not change trader behaviour.

Solar, battery and backup generation behind the market’s supply — IMG-2

3Execution Record

Milestone	Date
Proposals submitted	10 August 2022
Contract awarded	4 October 2022
Entered commercial use	6 June 2023
Certificate issued	16 July 2023
Operation and maintenance term	15 years from commissioning

4What This Meant for the Market Community

Who this project serves

Sabon Gari Market is among the largest trading centres in northern Nigeria, and Kano is the commercial anchor of the north — a city whose economy runs on wholesale and retail distribution reaching across the region and into the Sahel. The people affected by this installation are not passive recipients of a utility service. They are traders whose stock, working hours and margins are directly determined by whether the lights and the cold storage stay on.

The national backdrop

World Bank tracking published in 2025 recorded 86.8 million Nigerians without access to electricity, the largest deficit in the world, against a 61 per cent national access rate. For those who are connected, supply is intermittent: household survey data indicates roughly seven outages a week, typically around twelve hours each. Markets respond the way everyone else does — with generators.

What a market actually loses to unreliable power

The costs are specific and they fall on the smallest traders hardest:

• Perishables. Traders in fish, meat, dairy and produce either own refrigeration and fuel it continuously, or they price in spoilage and sell down fast at whatever the day’s clearing price is. Reliable power converts a daily loss into an inventory that holds.
• Cold drinks and ice. In Kano’s climate this is a trade in itself, and it is one of the more accessible businesses for women and for traders with little capital. It exists only where power does.
• Trading hours. Lighting determines how late a stall can stay open. In a market economy where margin is thin and volume matters, hours are revenue.
• Workshops and light manufacturing. Welders, tailors, grain millers and repairers within and around a market run motorised equipment. Every hour of outage is an hour of idle labour that still has to be paid for.
• Generator fuel as a standing tax. Traders currently self-generate, buying fuel in hard-currency-linked markets, maintaining machines and breathing the exhaust. That expenditure is a permanent deduction from working capital that produces nothing.
• Street lighting and market security. The scope covered installation and rehabilitation of streetlights. In a market that holds stock overnight, lighting is a security measure before it is an amenity — it affects theft, it affects whether traders are willing to open early and close late, and it affects who feels safe moving through the market after dark, which in practice means it affects women traders disproportionately.

Street lighting extends trading hours and security after dark — IMG-3

A market is shared infrastructure

The distinction between this project and a residential connection programme is that a market’s power supply is a common good serving thousands of independent businesses simultaneously. One installation changes the operating economics of every stall inside it at once, and the benefit compounds outward through the traders’ suppliers and customers across the region.

Continuous live monitoring via AMI and SCADA — IMG-4

Project Enquiries

International Consolidated Contractors Offshore SAL Ltd · 04 Oguda Close, Maitama, Abuja, Nigeria

Email: info@i-cc.co · Website: www.i-cc.co · Tel: +961 21 614100