The Mountain Times :- We've Got you covered

Two solar farms with 80 MW of generation capacity tendered in 2017 are being built and will be commissioned this year but another two, allocated at the same time, are no nearer construction. Kenya, however, has been touted as the site of Africa’s first wind-solar-storage hybrid project.

Kenya has been criticized for a lukewarm attitude to solar but could host the continent’s first solar-storage-wind hybrid project.

Kenya Power, the utility that owns and operates most of the electricity transportation lines in the country, in 2017 signed power purchase agreements (PPAs) for four 40 MW solar plants.

David Kariuki, deputy director in charge of energy planning at the Energy Regulatory Commission of Kenya, told pv magazine two of the facilities are under construction and will be commissioned this year. The projects are in Eldoret, western Kenya, and are being developed by Cedate and Selenkei, special purpose vehicles created by Eldosol and Radiant, counterparties to the PPAs.

The other two planned solar farms, however, “are yet to meet all the conditions precedent to the PPAs and have also not reached financial close”, said Kariuki, who added: “This implies that they will delay a little further.”

All four projects will receive a tariff of $0.12/kWh for 20 years, a figure based on the nation’s revised feed-in tariff law of 2012 which some stakeholders have criticized as overly generous.