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Google commits to pumping money into Africa’s biggest wind energy farm

Google has announced it’s investing in a major clean energy project in Africa in the form of the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project in Northern Kenya.

Located in the Loyangalani District, the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project is the largest of its kind in Afriuca.

When completed, the Ksh70 billion (R9.5 billion) project will have 365 wind turbines adding 310MW of low cost electricity to the Kenyan national electricity grid, which is enough to power around two million households.

A host of other international corporations have already invested in the project, including wind turbine maker Vestas. Google will buy into the project by purchasing Vesta’s 12.5% stake in Lake Turkana, once it’s complete and comes online.

“Kenya ranks among the world’s fastest-growing economies and has goals of universal energy access and increasing capacity of the grid by 5GW by the end of the decade. Lake Turkana can help meet these goals,” Rick Needham, Google’s energy and sustainability director said on the Google Green Blog.

“It offers one of the best wind resources in the world in terms of speed and consistency, and once operational, will deliver capacity equivalent to about 15% of Kenya’s current grid.”

The Lake Turkana project will add another in Google clean energy investment belt, adding to the $2 billion it has already put into 22 clean energy projects around the globe over the years.

Its first African energy project investment was the Jasper Power Project here in South Africa in 2013, having committed R103 million towards the solar photovoltaic plant in the Northern Cape. Jasper went online last year, adding 96MW to the national grid.

[Source and image – Google Green Blog]

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