Lake Turkana wind power project lined up for Sh13b Finnish loans kitty

The Lake Turkana Wind Power Farm is among energy projects set to benefit from Ksh 13.3 billion (€114 million) in loans from Finland over the next four years.

Finnish Foreign Trade and Development Anne-Mari Virolainen signed a cooperation agreement with the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s corporate finance branch, at the Annual Meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which ended on October 13, in Bali, Indonesia  to support wind power projects across the continent.

“In developing countries, electricity supply is also a human rights issue, and the lack of electricity is like a hindrance to social development,” she said.

The wind power project has already started to inject power to the national grid and had by Tuesday evening evacuated 187MW.

Once fully operational, the wind farm will provide 310MW of reliable, low cost energy to the national grid (i.e. approx. 15% of the country’s installed capacity).

The clean power from the project costs Ksh 8.5 per unit ($8.5 US cents), which is in the same range as that of geothermal power and three times lower than the cost of diesel-generated electricity.

Presented as one of the country’s largest private investments, the project is led by a consortium composed of KP&P Africa B.V and Aldwych International as co-developers, Investment Fund for Developing Countries, Vestas Eastern Africa Limited, Finnish Fund for Industrial Cooperation Ltd, KLP Norfund Investments AS and Sandpiper.

The total cost of the project is more than Ksh 89 billion ($850 million), and is expected to produce 310 MW, which will be sold to Kenya Power (KPLC) over a 20-year period. The project has already received funding from, among others, African Development Bank (AfDB), Standard Bank of South Africa, Nedbank, Norfund, European Investment Bank (EIB).