Nigeria Gets Africa's First Football Pitch To Be Powered By Players

Nigeria gets Africa’s first football
pitch lit by players
December 12, 2015 at 2:24 pm in News
Africa’s first football pitch lit solely by the players’
movements has been inaugurated in Lagos, the
economic hub of power-starved Nigeria, at a
ceremony attended by US-Senegalese rapper
Akon.
The technology, invented by a young British
engineer, consists of placing electronic tiles under
the artificial turf, which is converted into power
by kinetic energy.
Each time a player steps on a tile, seven watts of
electricity are generated and sent to a battery.

The stored power helps to feed six powerful but
low consumption LED floodlights that shine on the
pitch. Solar panels around the pitch complement
the technology, stocking electricity throughout the
day.
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The system has already been installed at a
football pitch in a favela in Rio de Janeiro, in
football-mad Brazil, which hosted the 2014 World
Cup.
“It’s brilliant,” said Kusagba Oluwadamilola, an
18-year-old sports student, who plays for the
football team at the Federal College of Education
(Technical), where the pitch has been set up.
“It’s going to be really useful. Until now we
couldn’t play at night,” he told AFP.
The man behind the technology, Laurence
Kemball-Cook, 30, launched his own company,
Pavegen, four years ago.
Since then, the invention has been installed in
150 locations across the globe from parks and
airports to shops and even dance floors.
Inspiring new generations with new technology is
essential, he said, particularly in Nigeria where
residents often have just a few hours of power a
day because of an erratic electricity supply.
As a result, households and companies are
forced to rely on heavily polluting generators.
Kemball-Cook said the pitch would not only help
“create a community” but also showed the need
to diversify Africa’s energy mix.
“We need solar, we need other solutions as well…
we need it right now, we don’t want to be using
these fossil fuel generators. We need to be using
more renewable sources of power,” he said.
With the initial cost of solar energy high, Kemball-
Cook said he hoped to bring down the cost of the
tiles by mass production to as little as $50 (45
euros) per square metre through economies of
scale.
Rap superstar Akon made a surprise appearance at
the launch of the newly built pitch on Thursday to
the delight of the students.
He has been involved in renewable energy
projects with his Akon Lighting Africa, created in
2004, whose objective is to electrify Africa with
solar energy.
The project is already running in 15 countries and
he is aiming for 34 by 2020.
“I am proud to be here,” said the singer and
producer, who was born in the United States but
spent his childhood in Senegal.
“Climate change makes things different today,”
he said, as delegates to a UN conference in Paris
thrashed out a historic agreement to cut global
warming.
The Pavegen tiles are “an extraordinary concept
for Africans who play football every day,” he
added.
Football is the king of sports in Nigeria, whose
national team the Super Eagles has won the
African Cup of Nations three times, as well as
gold at the 1996 Olympic Games.
“This is an amazing concept… to be able to
generate energy while you’re playing football to
me is a no brainer to help build new renewable
sources and also to support the entrepreneur that
comes up with this invention,” he added.
The development of renewable energy could
create businesses and jobs in Africa, he added.
Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell, partners of Pavegen,
financed the installation of the pitch.
The company is the main oil explorer in Nigeria —
Africa’s number one producer — and has been
widely criticised for the environmental impact of
its activities in theNiger Delta region.
Pavegen and Shell have learnt lessons from the
Rio pitch, where residents objected to having to
pay by the hour. There will be no charge at the
Lagos pitch.

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