200MW floating coastal power plant plan faces stiff resistance

A consumer lobby has protested the planned installation of an emergency natural gas power plant off the Kenyan coast, warning it will significantly drive up electricity costs. 

The Electricity Consumers Society of Kenya (Elcos) said the offshore plant will reverse the country’s progress by reintroducing expensive and polluting thermal power.

In recent years, thermal generation has been declining as Kenya focuses heavily on expanding its renewable energy capacity. 

Until now, the government has been reluctant to sign new power supply agreements or renew expiring contracts with thermal producers, a deliberate move aimed at stabilising power costs and greening the national electricity grid. 

However, the Energy and Petroleum Ministry recently announced plans to deploy a 200-megawatt (MW) natural gas plant on a floating barge. The facility is expected to be operational by the end of the year, although the ministry has yet to select a contractor to build it. 

While natural gas burns cleaner than the heavy fuel oil used by many local thermal plants, it remains an environmentally harmful fossil fuel. Critics caution that an offshore plant poses a specific and direct threat to marine life along the Kenyan coast. 

Isaac Ndereva, the executive director at Elcos, said Kenya should not relapse into relying on thermal power plants, whose contribution to the grid should be negligible by 2032, when most Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) for thermal power producers are expected to have expired and paved the way for a grid that is near-100 per cent green. 

“Kenya’s electricity demand growth has never been a surprise. It is gradual, predictable and can be forecast years in advance. Therefore, there can be no justification for emergency-style power procurement when the country has had sufficient time to plan and invest in affordable, sustainable and indigenous sources of energy,” he said in an open letter to the government and called on the President and the Judiciary, Parliament, to reject any proposal that he claimed would “introduce unnecessary and costly fossil fuel generation into the country’s energy mix”. 

Kenya started relying on thermal power plants in 1997 to bridge a supply gap that was occasioned by severe droughts that resulted in a drop in power generation, which then largely relied on hydro plants.

The thermal plants would, however, become a permanent feature of the country’s generation mix. Their contracts are, however, in their tail-end years, and the government, yielding to public pressure, has been reluctant to renew them. Over the years, the thermal plants have been blamed for the high cost of electricity in the country. 

“History has taught us painful lessons. Kenyans have paid heavily for costly thermal power contracts that locked consumers into long-term capacity payments and fuel costs for decades. Many of these arrangements have been the subject of public concern regarding transparency, value for money and their impact on electricity tariffs. We must not repeat the mistakes of the past,” said Ndereva. The gas-fired plant is expected to help meet growing demand, which has been rising while the country has not had a corresponding increase in power production capacity. Installed power-generating capacity has, in fact, stagnated following a seven-year freeze on signing of new Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) between Kenya Power and independent electricity producers. 

Over the moratorium period, which came into force in May 2018 and was lifted in November 2025, no new PPA was signed, which has meant that the power plant pipeline in the country has run dry, with the installed capacity stagnating since 2022 at about 3,340MW.  

This is despite growing consumption, with peak electricity demand growing significantly, from 2,051 MW in May 2022 to a high of 2,439.06 MW in December 2025. The mismatch in growth has resulted in some power consumers experiencing outages as power sector authorities implemented electricity rationing of sorts.