SOLAR MAGNowadays, more and more solar panels in Kenya appear in front of the public. On August 1, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault witnessed the signing of a credit facility agreement. The agreement indicates that the Kenyan government will receive a 33-million-euro credit from the French government. And Kenya will use the credit to establish 23 solar mini-grid power plants with the total capacity of 9.6MW. The electricity generated by these plants will be transmitted to the northern part of Kenya.
In the near future, you’ll not only see many solar panels in Kenya, but also windmills. That’s because, besides the 320-MW Lake Turkana Wind Power project located in Northern Kenya, the government also plans to use a part of the credit to build a 0.6-MW mini-grid wind power plant - which will scale up the projected production of wind power.
More Descriptions of This Project
For a long time, most of the arid counties in Northern Kenya have relied on thermal power. Mainly the power is from the relatively developed trading centers in Kenya. In other words, lots of pastoralist communities are still lacking in electricity. We believe both the solar power and wind power plants will surely help ease the power shortage in these areas.
President Uhuru Kenyatta pointed out that this project will help to reduce the average cost of electricity production in Kenya by an average of 20%. In addition, this project can contribute to improving the security of energy supply, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and supporting the sustainable economic development.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault expressed that: France has been making efforts to promote renewable energy to fight against climate change and support sustainable economic development. This agreement signed with Kenya is one of the important moves to put sustainable development concept into practices.
Fifty percent of the power distribution companies owned by the Kenyan government will implement the project. And the French Development Agency will handle the disbursement of the funds on behalf of the French government. Until now this agency has committed loans worth a total of over 800 million euros to Kenya’s projects since 2000.
Exciting News About Power Growth in Kenya
With many new power plant projects, the number of citizens who connect to the power grid has grew from 13 million to about 25 million since 2013. So far, he government has spent about 350 million US dollars helping more than 22,000 schools connect to electricity. Thanks to the solar panels in Kenya, about 4,000 of those schools are connecting to electricity through stand-alone photovoltaic systems. It is exciting that the total power capacity in Kenya has risen from 1,765MW to 2,422MW. And the renewable power capacity has taken up more than half of it. It can predict that there would be more and more solar panels in Kenya. comment↓
