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Every harvest season, Nigerian maize farmers leave behind a resource nobody prices: the stalks, cobs and husks stripped from the grain. Multiplied across the country's roughly 5.7 million hectares of maize cultivation, that residue represents a renewable energy feedstock large enough to matter to national power planning, and small enough, in cost terms, that it has been almost entirely ignored by investors.

My doctoral research at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte set out to answer a narrow but consequential question for Nigeria's power sector: using thirteen years of the National Agricultural Extension and Research Liaison Services' (NAERLS) Wet Season Agricultural Performance Survey, which states offer the best combination of low production cost and high maize output to support commercial biomass power generation – and where, precisely, should such plants be sited to minimise the cost of getting that electricity to the people who need it?

A productivity index the power sector hasn't used before 

The analysis constructs what I term a Mean Combined Cost Productivity Ratio Index (MCCPRI), essentially the ratio of what it costs to grow maize on a hectare of land to how much maize that hectare yields, aggregated across all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory. Lower is better: it means cheap, abundant feedstock. 

Applying this index through GIS-based suitability mapping, three findings stand out for anyone thinking about where private capital should go next in Nigeria's biomass sub-sector. Anambra State ranks as the single best-suited location nationally on the combined cost-productivity criterion, ahead of every state currently under consideration for biomass investment.

Sokoto State offers the lowest raw production cost per hectare of maize cultivation in the country. Ondo State delivers the highest maize output per hectare, making it the strongest candidate on a pure yield basis.

Delta and Gombe states form the next-best suitability tier, followed by Sokoto, Yobe and Kogi. This matters because Nigeria's only biomass power commitment to date – the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation's memorandum of understanding with Kogi State for a bagasse-fired plant –  was signed without the benefit of this kind of comparative state-level analysis. My findings suggest Kogi is a reasonable, but not optimal, single-state choice; a multi-state approach captures considerably more value.

What the optimisation model recommends

Beyond identifying suitable states, the dissertation solves a mixed-integer linear programming (location-allocation) problem – the same class of model used in commercial site-selection and logistics – to determine where biomass plants should physically sit to minimise the weighted cost of transmitting electricity to demand centres, using each state's per-capita electricity supply deficit as the demand weighting.

The result is a ranked, scalable siting plan. A single-plant scenario favours Asaba, Delta State. As the number of plants increases to five, the optimal portfolio becomes Onitsha North, Asaba, Lokoja, Gombe (state), and Sokoto North – a configuration that would bring approximately 52.8 MW of new baseload renewable capacity into the mix and, on current outage-related loss estimates, salvage close to $4.93 million annually in sales value that Nigerian SMEs currently lose to power outages.

To put the 52.8 MW figure in context, it is more than ten times the 5 MW biomass target set under the Energy Commission of Nigeria's most conservative NECAL 2050 trajectory (Trajectory 1), achievable, on this analysis, from a single well-sited five-plant rollout using nothing more exotic than maize residue already being produced today.

Cost comparison (chart data): Biomass FIT (capital+O&M) = $0.1547/kWh · National grid tariff = $0.13/kWh · Diesel self-generation = $1.075/kWh.

Why this is a financing story, not just an engineering one

Nigeria's National Electricity Regulatory Commission has set a feed-in tariff for biomass capacity in the 1–10 MW band, at roughly $112/MWh for capital cost recovery and $42.71/MWh for operations and maintenance (2016 base year figures). That is comfortably below the roughly $1.075/kWh cost of diesel self-generation that many Nigerian firms currently absorb, and it sits inside the range that makes public-private partnership structures – build-operate-transfer, transfer-operate-transfer, or blended finance – commercially rational rather than merely aspirational. 

South Africa offers a useful comparator. Its Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme brought over 6,300 MW online between 2011 and 2016 through competitive international auctions, though tellingly, only two of those awarded projects were biomass-fired, suggesting the sub-sector remains under-capitalised even in Africa's most developed renewable energy market. Nigeria's opportunity is to define, ahead of its peers, a data-driven pipeline of biomass sites rather than negotiate them on a one-MoU-at-a-time basis.

There is also a circular-economy argument that should interest ESG-minded investors and development finance institutions: maize residue currently classified as agricultural waste, much of it burned in the field, becomes a priced input. That shift touches the productivity goals of Nigeria's Agricultural Promotion Policy as much as it does the energy-security goals of the National Energy Policy, which is precisely the kind of cross-sectoral story development financiers are mandated to fund.

The financing gap is data, not appetite

The binding constraint on scaling this beyond a single-state MoU is not technology or even capital; it is the absence of granular, geo-referenced production cost data at the farm level, and the absence of any published capital or operating cost benchmark for a Nigerian biomass plant (the Kogi State MoU discloses no such figures). Closing that data gap, through better-funded agricultural extension surveys and farm-level GPS data collection, is a modest public investment that would materially de-risk private capital deployment in this space.

For a country still importing the bulk of its ideas on biomass financing from elsewhere, the data to build a homegrown, evidence-based investment case already exists. It simply hasn't been assembled and presented to the people who allocate capital – until now.

Adedolapo Akinde, PhD, holds a doctorate in Infrastructure and Environmental Systems from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, an MSc in Environmental Economics from the University of York, and works as an independent energy consultant and researcher based between Abuja and Lagos.