“There are huge opportunities in power generation because of the demand in the region,” says Engineer Joseph Njoroge, Principal Secretary at Kenya’s Ministry of Energy & Petroleum. The ministry is a long-time supporter of the annual East African Power Industry Convention and this year’s host ministry. The event returns to Nairobi again once again from 3-4 September and will gather the region’s leading power utilities, investors and technology and service providers. 

Specific road map to 5000MW
Over the last nine months, the ministry has embarked on a very ambitious plan to reach the 5000 megawatt generation capacity in Kenya and Eng Njoroge says so far the biggest achievement has been “to have been able to draw up a very specific road map of the contribution to the 5000MW of different technologies. And the main technologies that we are using for those 5000MW is coal, which is going to contribute about 2000MW, LNG, which is liquefied natural gas, which should be contributing about a 1000MW and more importantly the local resource, renewable energy, in the form of geothermal, which is supposed to contribute about 1700MW. And most of that work is going to be done between Kengen and other independent power producers.”

Enormous opportunity
Last year, the East Africa Community revealed a $64-billion dollar spending plan on joint power projects in the region for the next 25 years to generate eight times more power than is currently available. The Principal Secretary agrees that there are enormous opportunities in the sector: “there is also a huge opportunity in supporting infrastructure and development. And considering that in most of the countries in the region, the citizens do not have sufficient access to power. For example, here in Kenya only 32% of the citizens have access to electricity. So that unmet demand in itself is a huge opportunity for investors who want to come and invest in the region. This is a growing, emerging economy and therefore the region provides huge opportunities for investors who want to come and do power generation and so on.”

According to Eng. Njoroge one of the reasons that the ministry partners with EAPIC is that the event “provides a forum where different players in the industry from different countries meet and exchange ideas and cross-fertilise each other with great ideas and even more importantly expose opportunities that are available in different parts of the region.  It is a forum that provides the opportunity for benchmarking, sharing ideas and learning from others.”

Spintelligent