Lake Turkana Wind set for revamp to boost production

 

The Lake Turkana Wind Power project is set for a revamp to boost its production and realize its potential opportunities. 

Clir will  enhance LTWP’s wind farm performance tracking and support its Kenya-based team in realizing opportunities for optimization.

Kenya has committed to meeting a growing demand for electricity with 100 per cent renewable generation, in order to bring down both national emissions and electricity costs.

With the wind farm now operational, LTWP has turned its focus on ensuring that the wind farm is able to take full advantage of this optimal resource, and, ultimately deliver  high yield returns for its investors.

As such, LTWP has entered into a partnership with Clir, who will analyze data from each of Lake Turkana’s 365 turbines in the context of available resource, geospatial features, and nearby turbines.

“Lake Turkana is a particularly unique project, the first of this scale in Africa, having worked across a number of large-scale projects around the world, we are keen to leverage our wide-ranging experience to assess Lake Turkana’s current performance and potential gains,” said David O’Hare, Director, Europe, Clir.

Through its machine learning-driven analysis, Clir will be able to see through the ‘noise’ of resource fluctuation and identify any instances of underperformance and their causes, providing LTWP with the insights necessary to increase annual energy production, monitor asset health and manage technical financial risk.

Clir’s team will further use this analysis to compare individual asset performance at a project, portfolio, and industry level, with insights shared with all project stakeholders via Clir’s reporting function.

“We are committed to making sure this project produces beyond our expectations. With Clir, our team of local technicians will be supported with the most up-to-date digital tools and analytics to target operations and maintenance and cut unnecessary asset downtime,” said Wellington Otieno, Chief Technical Officer, LTWP.

“With our turbines performing at their best, we will be in a position to supply Kenya with consistent, low-priced, green energy.”

LTWP started supplying power to the grid in September 2018 earning Sh11.05 billion as sales revenues for supplying electricity to Kenya power in the first 10 months of operation to June 2019, pointing to the strong prospects of the mega project.

Kenya has been shifting its focus to clean energy, with investments in renewable energy estimated at Sh145 billion, according to a United Nations Environmental Programme report.

Electricity generation is responsible for widespread greenhouse gas emissions owing to heavy reliance on fossil fuels.

In 2020, electricity consumers in Kenya paid more for the commodity  after production cuts hit the Lake Turkana Wind Power, raising the proportion of costly energy on the national grid.

In July, the Turkana plant was hit by an operational outage of nearly two weeks.

LTWP’s sustainability reports say since connection to the national grid, it has offset 0.7 million tonnes of carbon emissions.This is expected to earn the government revenue.