DEG finances wind park in Kenya

• 20 million euros to develop the largest wind park in sub-Saharan Africa
• Total capacity of 300 megawatts planned
• Additional investments into local infrastructure

The largest wind park in sub-Saharan Africa will be built at Lake Turkana in the northwest of Kenya. For its development and construction, DEG – Deutsche Investitions- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft mbH provides the operating company, SPV Lake Turkana Wind Power Ltd. (LTWP), with a mezzanine loan to the amount of 20 million euros. Further lenders are the African Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, the European development finance institutions Proparco (France) and FMO (Netherlands) and other African development finance institutions and commercial banks, including the Standard Bank of South Africa Ltd. The total investment volume is 623 million euros.

“Like climate and environment protection, the commitment for the countries of sub-Saharan Africa is one of the strategic focuses of DEG. With our financing for the wind park at Lake Turkana we boost private-sector commitment for renewable energy carriers,“ said Eric Kaleja, Director of the DEG Representative Office in Kenya, on the occasion of the signing ceremony in Nairobi.

The “Lake Turkana Wind Park” is intended to be expanded step by step until 2017. By that time, 365 wind turbines of the Danish Vestas Wind Systems A/S will generate 300 megawatts of energy. The supporting infrastructure comes largely from Siemens. Fed into the national grid, the electricity is expected to cover around 17 per cent of the domestic demand in its first year of operation alone.

In the context of the construction of the wind park, further investments into the local infrastructure are being planned. The network operator of the Kenyan government, Kenya Electricity Transmission Company, is, for instance, going to build a new 428-kilometre power line. The wind park operator is going to undertake the development of a 204-kilometre stretch of the road connecting the project area with the A2 highway (Ethiopia – Nairobi).

At present, only every tenth household in East Africa has access to electricity. In rural areas, supply is particularly poor and many people in these regions continue to use the expensive and environmentally hazardous kerosene as an energy carrier. The Kenyan government has now presented a “Rural Electrification Masterplan“, which, amongst others, intends to expand smaller hydro, wind and solar power stations in regions far away from the grid and offer more attractive feed-in rates for the operators.