Lagos Cable Landing Station Receives 10-Year Renewable Power Contract

Lagos energy developer Grid Crux Energy Solutions signed a 10-year energy-as-a-service contract on Tuesday with Dolphin Telecoms to supply solar electricity to its Lagos Cable Landing Station.

Grid Crux Chief Executive Officer Mojola Ola and Dolphin Telecoms Managing Director Abdelrahman Bashar Khalifa led executives from both firms at the signing ceremony in Lagos. Grid Crux will design, finance, construct, and manage the solar equipment at the coastal facility.

The setup represents the first renewable energy-as-a-service installation at an Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) cable landing station in Anglophone Africa.

The agreement supplies renewable power directly to coastal infrastructure handling Nigeria's international internet capacity.

Solar setup to cut diesel consumption in Lagos

The solar equipment will produce over 144 megawatt-hours of electricity each year, totaling over 1,500 megawatt-hours across the 10-year duration.

The solar installation works together with current energy supplies at the station to reduce diesel generator operations, fuel expenses, plant emissions, and site noise.

Engineers built real-time remote tracking software into the solar equipment to allow continuous performance monitoring and early system maintenance.

Grid Crux Chief Executive Officer Mojola Ola said the project maintains continuous power operations while lowering generation costs.

"A landing station is where Nigeria connects to the rest of the world, and it cannot go dark. Our job is to keep it powered reliably while bringing down both the cost and the carbon behind every kilowatt-hour," Ola explained.

"We are focused on three things for Dolphin: reliability, cost reduction and ESG."

Dolphin Telecoms Managing Director Abdelrahman Bashar Khalifa stated that the transition supports long-term infrastructure planning.

"Power is more essential in these times, and people are using it more than ever. This is our way of committing to the future by making provision for the next generation. We are delighted to have Grid Crux with us on this journey," Khalifa said.

Regional reach of the ace cable infrastructure

The Lagos landing facility feeds raw internet capacity from the 17,000-kilometre ACE undersea cable to local telecom networks, internet providers, businesses, and government departments.

The ACE submarine cable runs along the Atlantic coast from Europe to South Africa, passing through 17 African nations. Dolphin Telecoms invested over $60 million in the overall cable network and controls landing rights in Dakar, Accra, and Lagos. These three urban markets cover about 80 per cent of West Africa's population.

Atinuke Adeniran, Project Lead for Strategy and Performance at Grid Crux, noted that planning for the installation took three years.

"This project has been three years in development and represents a long-term commitment to integrating renewable energy into critical infrastructure. We built it to be repeatable. What we have delivered in Lagos can be taken to any landing station or data centre on the continent," Adeniran said.

Grid Crux and Dolphin Telecoms confirmed that the engineering designs, commercial structures, and monitoring tools used in Lagos can be deployed to other data facilities along the ACE cable route.

A cable landing station is an onshore building where sea communications cables connect to national land-based phone and internet networks.

An energy-as-a-service arrangement allows a company to receive power equipment installed on its property without paying initial purchasing fees. The energy provider funds, installs, and maintains the setup while charging the user for operational service.

ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance, which describes standard operational guidelines used to evaluate business sustainability, environmental impacts, and corporate governance practices.