NAIROBI: Tropical power has opened its new 2.4 MW anaerobic digestion (AD) power plant in Nakuru County, Kenya, the first such plant ever to be connected to the grid in Africa.
The Biojoule plant has been installed at the Gorge Farm Energy Park. The park includes an 800 ha vegetable farm, which will be able to supply around 150 t/d of biomass feedstock for the digester. The biogas produced from the process is then burned to produce electricity. The AD equipment was made by Snow Leopard while the gas boiler came from GE. The plant is designed to run at the Energy Park’s high 2,000 m altitude.
The plant, which cost US$7.5m, took 12 months to build. It is expected to have a life-span of 25 years and have paid for itself within six years. Tropical Power believes that the plant will save 7,500 t/y of carbon emissions by displacing oil-fired electricity generation. It will help to diversify Kenya’s energy mix.
The Gorge Farm Energy Park itself will also act as a field research facility for the University of Oxford. The research team will be led by Tropical Power chairman Mike Mason, and aims to improve AD technology so that it can compete on price with conventional electricity.
“Through the Gorge Farm Energy Park we aim to displace expensive and imported generation fuels – like diesel and heavy fuel oil – from Kenya’s distributed power mix. The Gorge Farm AD Plant is proof that locally produced feedstock can generate clean and cost effective distributed power,” says Mason.
The governor of Nakuru County, Kinuthia Mbugua, adds that distributed power projects like this one are vital for Kenya’s energy security, reliability and efficiency.
“The Park will be using local crop waste and the sun to generate clean, renewable power close to the point of use. I look forward to working with Tropical Power, Kenya Power and the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum to see how we can develop more biogas projects for organic and municipal waste in the county,” he says.
As well as electricity, the plant will produce around 25,000 t/y of nitrogen-rich organic matter as a waste product, which will be fed back into the farm as a fertiliser, displacing around 20% of synthetic fertiliser use.
Tropical Power also plans to install a 10 MW solar PV plant at Gorge Farm and hopes to begin construction in 2016.
