Kenya Electricity Generating Company, KenGen, has opened an electric vehicle charging station in Nairobi, joining other stakeholders in the e-mobility push.
KenGen engineer Catherine Nyambala said the company will bring in electric cars in the coming days to test the station and provide data that will help enhance legislative laws for e-mobility.
“At KenGen, we have an electric vehicle charging station already installed and soon we are bringing in the electric vehicles to help in data collection for e-mobility,” Nyambala said.
“E-mobility is the fastest way that as a country we are going to do the transition because of displacement of fuel.”
E-mobility is a key component of the global effort to reduce pollution by promoting the use of clean-fuel vehicles that will reduce dependency on diesel and gasoline.
This comes just a month after Kenya debuted its first electric bus as the country’s transition to e-mobility accelerates.
A new electric vehicle company in Kenya has launched. In March, BasiGo launched a KSh5 million (US$4,2571) passenger electric bus in response to rising demand for ecologically friendly transportation.
BYD Automotive, the world’s leading maker of electric buses, built the 25-seater bus, which has a 250-kilometer range and a recharge time of less than four hours.
Kenya Power claims to have sufficient power to charge electric automobiles. During off-peak hours, it claims to have enough electricity to charge 50,000 buses and two million motorcycles.
This comes as KenGen adds 83 megawatts of power to the national grid, bolstering the government’s attempts to supply consumers with affordable power.
The facility, according to KenGen CEO Rebecca Miano, will increase the State-owned power producer’s share of installed geothermal capacity to 42 percent.
The government is counting on KenGen to provide more power because its fees are cheaper than those of independent power companies.
“Olkaria 1 Unit 6 which is 83 megawatts last week marked the successful commissioning of that plant and it is now injecting power into the grid,” Ms Miano said on the sidelines of the inaugural sustainable energy conference in Olkaria.
The meeting, which drew representatives from the government, the energy sector, and financial institutions, is intended at devising solutions to the difficulties that stymie the scale-up of clean energy generation and consumption.
The plant’s construction began in December 2018, as Kenya set out to generate inexpensive and clean power in order to boost economic growth.
Kenya Power would sell more geothermal energy to consumers as a result of the facility, up from 37.3 percent now.
Wind and solar energy account for 16 and 1%, respectively, bringing the total share of renewable energy in the national grid to 54.3 percent.
Hydropower accounts for 30% of total energy, while diesel-powered thermal plants account for 10%.