Kenya to add a million power consumers by 2013
NAIROBI, KENYA - Kenya plans to connect an extra one million consumers to its national electricity grid in the next two years, the president said, as the country strives to boost rural electrification.
East Africa's largest economy is beset by regular power outages due to insufficient electricity generation and a dilapidated transmission network. Business leaders say the blackouts are curbing economic growth.
Kenya Power and Lighting Company, the country's sole power distributor, said it has 1.6 million customers that serve about eight million people, accounting for 22 percent of the population.
"By 2013 one million new consumers will be connected to the national electricity grid," said President Mwai Kibaki, during the launch of KPLC's rights shares on the Nairobi Stock Exchange.
KPLC raised 9.8 billion Kenya shillings US $120.3 million, 3.2 percent above target, to help fund upgrades to its network by issuing 488.6 new ordinary shares in a rights issue in December.
"The excess 300 million shillings has already been refunded to the applicants who could not get their full allocation," said Eliazar Ochola, KPLC's chairman.
Kenya plans to spend $2 billion this fiscal year to upgrade and expand the national grid, including the construction of 2,700 km of transmission line and increasing geothermal power generation by 280 megawatts.
Speaking at the launch, Energy Minister Kiraitu Murungi said sector players were working to inject an additional 1,800 megawatts to the national grid by 2015 through geothermal, wind, coal and thermal plants.
As at 1135 GMT, KPLC's shares had inched down 2.17 percent to 22.75 shillings per share.
Equities analysts expect the share price to keep dropping toward the 19.50 shillings rights issue price.
Related News
The UK’s energy plan is all very well but it ignores the forecast rise in global sea-levels
LONDON - IN concentrating on electrically driven cars, the UK’s new ten-point energy plans ignores the elephant in the room.
It fails to address the forecast six-metre sea level rise from global warming rapidly melting the Greenland ice sheet.
Rising sea levels and storm surge, combined with increasingly heavy rainfall swelling our rivers, threaten not only hundreds of coastal communities but also much unprotected strategic infrastructure.
New nuclear power stations proposed in this United Kingdom plan would produce radioactive waste requiring thousands of years to safely decay.
This is hardly the solution for the Green Energy future that our overlooked marine energy resource could…
