Kenya Reaps The Wind

From a distance the highlands look like a giant fist resting on the landscape, a series of knuckles forming the peaks of the Ngong Hills. From the top of the escarpment Kenya’s capital Nairobi spreads out to the east, the breathtaking Great Rift Valley to the west.

Every afternoon the gentle morning breeze that sweeps up from the Rift Valley grows into a strong wind and by nightfall it has become a blustering gale. Now, Kenya’s government hopes to harness that power. Next month the country’s first wind farm will open on the top of the Ngong Hills.
The $15 million pilot project funded by the Belgian government started in April last year. The turbines chosen were the largest ones KenGen could manage. The towers and blades were shipped in from Europe then loaded onto trucks which had to navigate Kenya’s appalling roads until they reached the foot of the Ngong Hills themselves.

Once operational each of the turbines will produce up to 850 kilowatts of power, meaning another 5.1 megawatts will feed into the national grid. It may not sound like much but in rural Kenya where electricity consumption is low each turbine can produce enough power to supply as many as 1,000 homes.

Kenya – like much of Africa – is facing a looming power crisis with regular power cuts becoming more and more frequent. Today in Kenya potential production slightly outweighs demand but that will change fast.

If everything works at full capacity, Kenya’s various hydroelectric, geothermal and thermal plants produce 1,200 megawatts while Kenya’s citizens use 1,050 MW. But with global warming causing the rains to fail with depressing regularity and deforestation also reducing the flow of rivers, hydropower generation is down.

“Kenya is facing a crisis of power generation,” said Christian Lambrechts, program officer at the United Nations Environment Program in Nairobi, “and electricity is key to economic development.”

Planet Ark