Kenya launches largest wind power plant in Africa | Hacker News Reader

Kenya launches largest wind power plant in Africa

cnn.com

66 pointsdoener21 comments

“While these projects will help build energy supply on the continent, the International Energy Agency has said sub-Saharan Africa needs to invest $300 billion in order to achieve universal electricity access by 2030.”

While that sounds like a lot of dosh – and it is – in the grand scheme of things the benefits would be unimaginably transformative.

Geek stats: https://ltwp.co.ke/ltwp-connected-to-grid/

  • Construction of 365 Wind Turbine Generators (WTGs), with a capacity of 850kW each, for a
    total project installed capacity of 310 MW connected via a 33kV collection grid to the substation;
  • Installation of 365 Step-up Transformers 0.69/33 kV per Unit;
  • Construction of a sectionalized 33kV Substation, Step-up Power Transformers 33/220(400) kV;
  • Installation of three Dynamic Reactive Power Compensation Systems (Statcoms);
  • Installation of a SCADA System;
  • Construction of the LTWP Accommodation Village, which houses 148 people;
  • Construction and maintenance of 130km of internal access roads; and,
  • Upgrading of 208km road from Laisamis to Sarima.

300 billion is actually a lot less than I would have thought... and incidentally it's about 6 times less than the US invasion of Iraq.

Nice segue to a completely off topic military/political bunny trail.

The global climate catastrophe is very much a political problem, as are its solutions.

Just saying instead of killing each other in pointless wars we could use those resources to avoid global warming and help raise people out of poverty. I can dream, no? ;-)

Last I calculated, All energy needs of all of the world would be supplied with solar plants worth a trillion dollar.

I'd love to see the numbers on this if you have them in a shareable format. How did your model account for value deflation and what assumptions did it make about storage tech?

Including storage and distribution ?

In theory a huge solar plant in the Sahara desert would cover all our needs, the problem is moving/storing the energy.

The CNN article links to a PDF. Where exactly in the PDF can you find the 300 billion number mentioned? It seems far too small to me.

Read to the very bottom of the CNN article :)

I know where it is in the CNN article. That sentence links to a PDF file [1] which is the one I'm wondering about.

[1]: https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publicatio...

I visited Kenya last November and used their local Uber quite a bit. This ended up being a very effective way to meet technically inclined and entrepreneurial Kenyans. Talking with these people gave me a lot of optimism for their future, there's a lot of hunger (unintended pun...) and talent waiting to be utilized there. I really hope they continue to see development that will leverage and grow their technical skill base.

Are you talking about Uber drivers or is that some shared car service?

Uber specifically.

One of the main arguments of the global climate change deniers is that switching to renewable energy would destroy any chance of developing countries to build up their energy networks and escape poverty.

That's mistaken. Thanks to continuing declines in the price of solar and wind energy and also storage batteries, renewable energy has become for many places cheaper than fossil fuel electricity generation. And in fact the global loan and investment community as in the last couple of years realized this and has decided to stop financing coal generation plants.

What we are going to see in Africa is similar to how countries there leap-frogged past landlines and went straight to mobile phones. African countries are going to start building renewable energy facilities on a mass scale, and besides that many villages will simply install their own local fields of solar panels.

>destroy any chance of developing countries to build up their energy networks and escape poverty.

You mean cross country networks? Long haul, high voltage networks? If power is ubiquitous because of local grids with solar-fed storage to buffer night time use that enables everyone but high power users, i.e. industrial users. So the implication is only power hungry industrial base will let Africa escape poverty? That seems like a very last century view.

So happy to see this happening in Kenya. While still not enough capacity to really move the needle on the prices [1] and really make larger-scale manufacturing possible, it's a step in the right direction

[1]: https://stima.regulusweb.com/

Like most of my peers, I've been following this project with some interest. The key insight for me is how big an inhibitor lack of capital is for us poor countries. Our private and public sectors combined could not fund this project, and that saddens me a great deal.

I wonder what became to Akon solar panels plans ?

2024: Kenya erupts into civil war and darkness over before-end-of-life bearing replacement

You are downvoted quite hard but I wonder about the same underlying question. How stable are investments in these countries? How independent are these operations from arbitrary governmental decisions?

Or is for these states after the Oil Curse coming a solar curse...

Far as I know Kenya's oil and gas production is nil. The curse if anything is the continual need to import both. Building out solar and wind and transport electrification would make sense for them.

All the money they spend now for oil and gas could be used instead to pay for consumer and industrial goods. Example a friend of mine that spent 2 months traveling in Southern Africa said that imported building materials appear to very dear.

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