Let there be light: Power connection cut to Ksh15,000

President Uhuru Kenyatta yesterday launched a mega consumer power connectivity drive that is expected to take electricity to millions of homes at a lower cost.At the same time, the government reduced the cost of connection for households by more than half to Ksh15,000.

The project, which is targets households, will use cheaper transmission line designs to cut the cost of connectivity from the current Sh36,000. Speaking in Machakos during the launch of the project, Mr Kenyatta said power consumers have the option of paying the Sh15,000 in cash or in instalments through their monthly bills.

“By 2017, 70 per cent of Kenyan households should have access to power,” Mr Kenyatta said. Kenya Power, the electricity distributor implementing the plan, said it is using a new transmission line design known as the Single Wire Earthing Return (SWER) to rollout the Last Mile Connectivity Project (LMCP), giving unconnected consumers cheaper access to power.

Lowering the cost of connectivity will also come as a relief to thousands of rural consumers who have been aspiring to connect their homes to the national grid but could not pay the more than Sh70,000 that Kenya Power demanded for homes located outside the 600 metres radius of a transformer.

Under the LMCP initiative, the requirement that distinguished between customers living within and beyond the 600 metre radius of transformer has been removed as the state will shoulder the costs of bringing transformers closer to homes. The plan is to connect 2.3 million new customers to the national power grid.

The Ksh34 billion initiative is being financed through the Kenya Electrification Fund that is backed by Ksh13.5 billion each from the World Bank and the African Development Bank (AfDB), and Ksh7 billion from the French Development Agency (FDA).

(BUSINESS DAILY)