Alten Africa will build a 40 megawatt solar plant in Eldoret, located in Uasin Gishu County. This will be its first utility scale project in Kenya and one of the largest solar power stations in East Africa.
The Kenya-based French firm says that Voltalia, a renewable energy firm, will execute the EPC (engineering, procurement, construction) and O & M (operations, and plant maintenance) service for the new photovoltaic plant.
Once it goes into commercial operation, scheduled for March 2020, approximately 123.6GWh of clean electricity will be injected every year into the grid.
This is expected to meet the annual energy consumption needs of over 824,000 Kenyans. The plant will also avoid the emission into the atmosphere of 33.88 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent every year of the plant’s life.
“This solar project is to be built on a land area of 100 hectares and will have over 161,000 monocrystalline panels set into solar single-axis trackers,” said Alten in a statement.
The power plant will be located in Kesses and will be a major boost to the many electricity projects that have been started or are planned as the country races to raise output to 5,000MW and cut the cost of electricity to consumers by half.
“This new project confirms our ambitions in Africa, a sun rich continent where a significant part of the population still has no or poor access to electricity. The project also underlines the benefits of Martifer Solar’s acquisition in order to reach our 2020 targets” said Sébastien Clerc, CEO of Voltalia.
