Africa’s largest wind farm

Nov 23rd, 2009 4:57 PM UTC
By Chris Scott

The Washington Post has an interesting profile of the planned construction of an enormous wind farm in Kenya’s Chalbi Desert. The hope is that the project will help boost energy supplies in the region.

Excerpts below, full piece here

Kenya is one of the continent’s greenest countries, with nearly three-quarters of its power coming from hydroelectric and geothermal sources. But its efforts to harness the wind have put it at the forefront of a budding movement in Africa, ahead of a global climate change conference in Copenhagen next month.

Ethiopia inked a $300 million deal last year with the French company Vergnet to build a wind farm. Tanzania is constructing two facilities that will boost its power supply by nearly 10 percent. And South Africa, the continent’s largest economy, hopes to complete 18 wind farms by 2014.

Kenya’s first wind farm, in the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi, began feeding into the national grid in August. Additional sites are being scouted near Lake Naivasha, a popular tourist retreat northwest of Nairobi, and in the blustery northeast near Ethiopia.

“What you see in Africa is a severe shortage” of power, said Phylip Leferink, sales and marketing manager for Vestas, the world’s leading supplier of wind turbines. “They have an urgent need for bringing up the capacity as soon as possible.”

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