General Electric to start building 100 MW wind farm next year

NAIROBI, KENYA: General Electric will start building a 100 MW wind power farm in Kenya early next year. The GE Distributed Power business leader in Sub-Saharan Africa George Njenga told reporters Thursday that the legal procedures for the $300 million (Sh26.7 billion) project for the Kipeto Wind Farm will be completed after 18 months.

“We have met 90 per cent of the documentation and all land requirements have been achieved. The negotiations with Kenya Power are at an advanced stage,” he said.

GE signed the first wind deal in the continent, for the Kinangop Wind Farm last year under the Vision 2030 Kenya Power Memorandum of Understanding in the renewable energy space. The project would provide maintenance for the wind farm for about 10 years through a service agreement with the Kinangop Wind Farm. The wind farm project will contribute 60 MW to the national grid.

In Naivasha, GE has installed 2.8 MW using GE Jenbacher gas engines. The farm waste-to-power project targets net sales of 2.2 MW, with 50 per cent to the national grid and another 50 to the farms. The project will be beneficial in generating revenue from electricity sales, employment creation, provision of organic fertiliser and will reduce carbon monoxide emission by 10,000 tonnes per annum.

Mr Njenga also said a good quantity of gas (methane) can be tapped from Dandora dump site, but a lot of legal procedures need to be followed. Kenya is pushing to expand its power generation capacity by 5,000 MW by 2017 from about 1,700 MW.

Njenga said GE in collaboration with Kenya Power and other stakeholders are committed to increase the number of people who will access electricity, at a cheaper cost, from the current 24 per cent to a higher percentage by 2017.

Big companies that are dependent on consistent supply of power, like cement, bottling, oil and gas companies, hospitals and printing industries, among others, will be the biggest beneficiaries of distributed power projects.

It will also provide grid stability in cases of power surge.