Kenya Power decries downside of increased solar, wind power supply

Kenya Power Managing Director Joseph Siror makes a point during the firm's state of the grid press briefing in Nairobi yesterday. [Wilberforce Okwiri, Standard]

Kenya Power has expressed concern over the growing share of energy supplied to the national grid from wind and solar sources, saying it is increasingly undermining the quality of electricity supply for end users.

The utility company says while these sources are touted as affordable to produce, their intermittent nature ends up costing more to monitor because they fluctuate much more than baseload power sources.

The firm is pushing for increased capacity of baseload sources, mainly hydro and geothermal,  even as the chief executive, Eng Joseph Siror, insists that this should not be viewed as a move against the intermittent power suppliers.

Citing other markets, Siror said the best practice of the share of intermittent power supply to the national grid is 15 per cent at most.

Kenya, however, is at 21 per cent. “That is very high,” he said yesterday during the Kenya Power state of the grid press briefing in Nairobi yesterday. “And this can rise to 34 per cent during the day.”

Egypt is said to be at 10.4 per cent, Ethiopia (5.3 per cent), Tanzania (1.2 per cent), and Uganda (4.0 per cent).

For Kenya, of its 3,213 MW installed capacity, the 21 per cent represents 649 megawatts (MW).  The share in Egypt is 6,200MW against the installed capacity of 59,700; Tanzania is 50MW against 4,075MW; Ethiopia is 519MW against 9,730 MW, and Uganda is 90MW against 2,098MW.

Siror said there should be a threshold above which any more variable renewable energy (VRE) sources are not added until the baseload is improved.

He said as more baseload sources are added, then VREs can follow suit, but the ratio should be maintained at 15 per cent.

“At no point should the pace of VREs exceed that of baseload,” he said. “That is why when we talk to the industry, especially in the Coastal part of the country, they will talk about power quality issues. The main reason for power quality in the country has to do with the penetration of VREs.”

Siror said the major challenge with VRE power sources, unlike hydro and geothermal, which are stable and predictable, is that a lot of work goes into monitoring the spikes. This costs money.

For example, if it suddenly becomes cloudy, then power from solar sources drops rapidly, and there is a need to find another avenue to replenish this gap. Alternatively, the cloud can clear up fast, and this also causes a spike in capacity.

This is the same with wind sources.

These fluctuations, he noted, are not conducive for industries whose operations are frequency sensitive. The solution, he said, is exploration of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and more geothermal mining to build up capacity for stable supply.

Currently, wind accounts for about 13 per cent of power supply to the grid and solar seven per cent. Hydro, on the other hand, accounts for 25 per cent, thermal 18 per cent, geothermal 31 per cent, with imports covering six per cent.

There is a potential baseload of over 10,000MW in the country: 9,000 from geothermal and 1,200MW from hydro.

“If you look at the power quality pre-installation of VREs, it was excellent, and the only way to mitigate this is to increase the quantum of baseload generation,” he said.

Kenya Power expects over 300MW into the national grid by December 2026. These are 200MW from Ethiopia (to make 400MW), 35MW from Orpower Twenty-Two Limited, 61MW from KenGen Olkaria 1, and 35MW from Globeleq.