News

KenGen tender for wellhead plants

KenGen tender for wellhead plants KenGen management visiting GEG's plants, Olkaria, Kenya (source: Lydur Skulason)
Alexander Richter 16 Apr 2015

KenGen seeks to keep costs low in order to feed the growth in geothermal development. An expression of interest has already been published by the firm.

Geothermal development is seeing steady growth in Kenya and according to recent local news, KenGen is now inviting “bids from firms interested in putting up wellhead plants on nine steam wells in Olkaria and Eburru geothermal fields with a capacity of 48 megawatts.”

KenGen has been pushing a lot of new projects forward and is eager to develop faster. The same local source states that “last year, KenGen announced the injection of additional power to the grid totaling 282MW from its Olkaria geothermal fields, 70MW in July, 140MW in September and the last 72MW in December. But these projects have been costly to the firm. In addition such projects require that the generating firm accumulates enough steam for the plant.”

This is a significant issue, therefore wellhead development seems to be the best way to keep costs down, according to the company.

“To cut on the generation cost, the firm now plans to lease power generation equipment for its wellhead plants from private firms with 10 years experience in geothermal power plant design, operation maintenance and transmission.The firm is keen to get the services for power generation on 9 wells located in the Olkaria and Eburru geothermal fields totaling 48MW.”

An expression of interest has already been published by KenGen.

Source: KBC Kenya