Kenya tops Bloomberg’s Climatescope rankings for African countries
Olkaria III plant by Ormat (source: video screenshot)
Alexander Richter
9 Dec 2019
The annual Climatescope study of Bloomberg New Energy Finance ranks countries in the emerging markets on their clean energy development performance and outlook. Kenya broke into the top five of this year highlighting its renewable energy investments.
The Climatescope study by Bloomberg New Energy Finance published each year provides a unique country-by-country assessment, interactive report and index that evaluates the investment conditions for clean energy in emerging markets.
While geothermal always provides only a small element in the overall report, it is interesting to report that this year, it is great to see Kenya breaking into the top five this year in the rankings of countries in Emerging Markets.
With its increasing share of non-large hydro renewables, the country has been adding solar, wind and geothermal. In 2018, so the report, Kenya recorded its highest ever clean energy investment with $1.4 billion. Kenya also accounted for over a third of all 2018 foreign investment into sub-Saharan Africa.
This though underestimates the role of geothermal for the country that now derives about half of its electricity consumed from geothermal power plants of the country at Olkaria, Kenya.
“The country is in the process of shifting from feed-in tariffs to reverse auctions as its primary means for spurring new-build. In August 2018, the parliament approved draft legislation to make this change but final action is still required. Under the last set of feed-in tariffs offered, the government received applications from over 4GW of clean energy projects. While this signalled the strength of the local development pipeline, it was also far more than the Kenyan grid was ready to absorb at the time.”
You can read more on the report and the evaluations by Bloomberg NEF via the link below.
Source: Climate Scope 2019 – Emerging Markets Outlook 2019 (pdf)
