Kenya plans to accelerate its electricity exports to other East African nations, officials at the state-owned electricity utility said on Thursday.
Kenya Power Managing Director Kenneth Tarus told a media briefing in Nairobi that it currently exports between 10 and 20 Megawatts of power each to Tanzania and Uganda.
"Kenya's exports to the region are likely to continue so long as our local demand will not have grown to meet our current electricity supply," Tarus said during the Fourth Edition of the Great Energy Debate.
The East African nation has an arrangement with neighboring Tanzania and Uganda to sell its surplus energy. "At the same time, we will also import from the countries when our electricity demand exceeds supply," Tarus said.
Kenya is at present constructing an electricity interconnector with Ethiopia. Kenya's installed electricity generation capacity currently stands at approximately 2300 Mw of electricity against a peak demand of 1650 Mw.
Tarus said that Kenya plans to add an additional 743 Mw of electricity in the next five years. Kenya Power, which is the sole power distributor in the country, plans to connect 70 percent of the population by the end of the year.
We are currently implementing a project that will connect an additional 312,000 households to the national grid with a 130 million U.S. dollars loan from the Africa Development Bank," the managing director said.
The power firm has also plans to spend 1 billion dollars over the next four years to refurbish its electricity transmission network so that it can support additional power generation.