How drones helped ‘save’ Turkana power project

Turbines at Lake Turkana Wind Power farm at Sarima, near Lake Turkana in Laisamis, Marsabit County. [Ali Abdi/Standard]

The use of new technology has been credited with completion of the Loiyangalani-Suswa line, saving taxpayers billions of shillings in monthly penalties.

The 433.96km line from Loiyangalani in Turkana to Suswa in Narok was completed in a record seven months after the Spanish company that had initially won the contract went bankrupt, exposing Kenyans to a Sh1 billion monthly penalty for delays in evacuating power to the national grid.

PowerChina, which took over the project, said a combination of a 24-hour work ethic in laying electricity transmission lines using most recent aerial technologies helped complete the project in the said time. 

 “In order to speed up the progress, the project department worked for 24 hours and adopted unmanned aerial vehicle - drones laying line construction for the first time,” said Yang Jia, PowerChina’s project manager for the line.

The line connects Africa’s largest wind power project - the 310MW Lake Turkana Wind Power farm - to the national grid, increasing the amount of cheaper electricity to consumers.

Another tender

“This enabled achieving technology to cross obstacles and rapid laying line, which greatly shortened the construction period and showed great efficiency advantages than the conventional manual tugging line,” said Mr Yang.

The project is the largest undertaken in Kenya so far and with the highest power transmission capacity of any line locally at 400kV.

Initially, started by a Spanish company which later went bankrupt, the Government was forced to issue another international tender which was won by PowerChina Guizhou Engineering Company. It started work on February 10 this year and completed the project on August 31. The project came into operation on September 10.

The Lake Turkana wind farm project has a capacity of 310MW or 365 turbines each with a capacity of 850Watts but the company said it will optimally provide about 60 per cent of the installed capacity.