October 02, (THEWILL) – President Bola Tinubu has approved the deployment of electric-powered vehicles for the North East Development Commission (NEDC), to ease transportation challenges in the region.
Chairman of the Commission, General Paul Tarfa (Rtd), disclosed this to State House correspondents after a meeting with Vice President Kashim Shettima at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, on Wednesday.
Tarfa, who recalled President Tinubu’s directive that cars should use CNG or electric vehicles said, “We at the Northeast Development Commission did a thorough analysis of our region, because we cover six states in the Northeast Region, and looked at the comparable advantage between CNG and e-vehicles.
“And after our thorough analysis, we came to the conclusion that for the North East region, the CNG could work, but e-vehicles can work better for many reasons.
“One is that our plan at the end of the day is to create modular solar power units across the state which can be used to power this percentage of e-vehicles.
“We sought and got the approval of the presidency for us to go ahead and come up with the framework of how we are going to deploy this e-mobility in the northeast and what kind of e-mobility, etc. And Mr President graciously gave approval and today we came to present to him the kind of E-vehicles we are going to introduce in the Northeast.
“There are three categories. One is the E-busses, which can carry about 40 people or passengers at a given point in time, at the minimum, and that’s it for intrastate, not interstate. And also we brought some samples of e-taxis which normally carry three people passengers as well as the driver, and we also brought in a highly modified tricycle.
“Most of the tricycles we have in the North East or elsewhere only carry three people plus the driver four, but in our case, we have modified it to carry eight people plus the driver, and it’s fully covered and very convenient, and we are also knowing the kind of weight and people we are going to carry. We’ve asked our engineers to modify the physical structure of the tricycle. when you look at it, you can see the tyres are bigger, the primes are bigger and so on and so forth.
“In doing that, we also consider local content that the body can be fabricated locally in the North East or somewhere else in the region.
“So, today we made a presentation to the President. And delightfully, Mr President approved that we should go ahead and deploy e-mobility in the northeast region.”
Tarfa acknowledged that there could be some challenges. He, however, said the Commission is putting modalities in place to build a 5kva or 10kva solar-powered grid to bridge power supply gaps.
