The proposed imperial city, Lagos
The ambitious new deal for a fresh town project within the Lekki -Epe corridor in Lagos seems to be taking shape as the promoters have formally flagged-off the Imperial International Business City (IIBC) project.
Dubbed as the first eco-friendly smart business city in Africa, the project is promoted through a joint-venture between the Elegushi Royal Family and a private developer, Channeldrill Resources Limited. All the plots in the proposed city will be part of the land reclamation in the 200-hectare project, which Oba Saheed Elegushi said will expand the Ikate kingdom and also extend Lekki Phase 1.
IIBC is being bankrolled through British Foreign Direct Investment of about $300 Million and off plan sales. The city has been zoned into residential, mixed used and commercial areas. Each zone will have low, medium and high density area as well as lagoon/water view area. A plot in the new city range from N64,350,000 to N429 million depending on the payment plan and size of plot.
The proposed scheme could be accessed through three locations: Freedom road through Lekki Phase 1 (Lekki Third Roundabout); Kunsenla Road by fourth Roundabout of Lekki-Epe Highway and Oba Saheed Ademola Elegushi Road by spare supermarket before Jakande. Another access road is being planned through Femi Okunu by Jakande roundabout.
The managing director of ChannelDrill, Mr. Olufemi Akioye, who spoke at Ground-breaking and Investor’s Interaction forum at the weekend, said IIBC being a smart and eco-friendly city will define the standard of urban development in Africa.
“ The island will attract the best companies from the globe. A place where work, home and play are walkable distances from each other, set in a tropical landscape that will be safe, relaxing and a pleasure to behold and live in.
“ IIBC will be an island that will utility self-sufficient to ensure perfection in infrastructural efficiency. Connected by future high speed water transportation, high speed rail and express highways to other parts of the Lagos mainland, Island and beyond,” he said.
The new city plans to integrate smart technologies and distinctive features, which will make it, first self-sustaining eco-friendly smart business district. For instance, real data of traffic flow within the city, the traffic light are connected to sensors that matched the surface traffic congestion (loads on surface transport) to free roads and the sensor also give active surveillance, monitoring and alerts at vantage points within the city (real time adaptive traffic management).
Similarly, smart emergency response, crime prevention (data centre) on demand clique of a bottom availability of emergency support; electricity – smart meters, smart grid and for energy optimization –meters is connected through the home area network (HAN) to advance metering infrastructure (AMI) with wired thermostats that’s connected to the grid.
The technology will help with adjusting electricity to buildings based on consumptions at different time of the day and it helps eradicate blackout or brownout. The conditions of utilities are monitored by sensors.
Proposed amenities include; roads with walk and bicycle way, waterways and lakes, underground drainage, sewage treatment, water and water treatment plant, 1-independent gas fired electricity and cooking gas piped to every house, fibre optics cable, cloud enabled Communication network and smart city/house infrastructure for willing subscribers, an mini golf course and shopping mall.
The managing director of ChannelDrill, Mr. Olufemi Akioye, who spoke at Ground-breaking and Investor’s Interaction forum the explained that the plans for the IPP in the smart city is to ensure that the city is intended to be self- sustained. Besides, the use of IPP within the city will ensure that there is no need for the use of generator by inhabitants of the city, leading to clean energy.
He also explained that the waste treatment plant to be built on the Island will also be producing methane that will be used for production of more electricity or cooking gas. “Electricity will be available on 24/7 basis; cooking gas will also be piped into each building thereby eliminating the usage of gas cylinders in the city,” Akioye explained.
Shedding more light on the power project within the development, Akioye explained that due to power supply intermittency, the developers have assumed that Lagos does not have capacity to uptake the new demand levels of the island. Therefore, a new intake substation on the Island would be supplied directly from an existing substation on the mainland via a subsea cable.
Also, this, he further explained, will act as a secondary supply to the city and could potentially be used to export surplus generated capacity to the existing Lagos distribution network.
Akioye said that exhaust gasses from the generators used in the IPP will be treated by a dedicated gas cleaning plant to ensure that fumes released into the atmosphere complies from the exhaust of generators with international standards; secondary power will be generated by alternative sources such as waste to power plants, while the fuel that is, liquefied natural gas (LNG) will be supplied to the city via barges. “Fuel will be pumped into bulk fuel storage bays via pipelines from the coast. Bulk storage feeds into a treatment plant before entering generator supply streams,” he explained.
Akioye said the infrasture consultants to the project, Mott MacDonald Limited, London, United Kingdom, are also banking on past project experience on past Master Plans that were executed in climatic conditions similar to those of Lagos to estimate power density figures. He said this will be calculated for each load zone based on land allocation.
“We are aware that air-conditioning is a large element within power demand in a highbrow area like the IIBC, so preliminary load estimate per plot is 100MVA,” he said.
