The loss making Kenya Power is now blaming its massive losses to the consumers’ growing shift from it’s expensive electricity to cheap solar energy.
The electricity retailer is also accusing heavy-consuming industrialists of resorting to other cheap and reliable sources of energy leaving it sink deeper into thinning revenues.
Kenya Power claims that industrial clients who account for 54.8 % of its sales revenues are increasingly shifting to own-generated solar power.
The retailer that enjoys monopoly in the market has continued to record dwindling revenues with massive corruption, looting and poor leadership concealed with lame excuses.
“The company operated in a challenging environment over the financial year under review, where demand growth at 3.7 % remained below the projected level of five percent. The dampened demand growth is further compounded with the increased threats of grid defection by the industrial category as decentralized renewable energy options are becoming more available and cheaper,” Kenya Power said in its report.
The massive shift to solar power by ‘big clients’ is pushing the collapsing firm into deeper financial woes as it complains of excess production of electricity.
The firm expects electricity demand to remain low at 2.3% in 2020, the lowest in a decade as factories, universities and companies to solar photovoltaic (PV) grid-tied systems for power generation and consumption at cheaper costs.
Africa Logistics Properties (ALP), Mombasa International Airport, the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (Icipe) are some of the heavy consumers that have commissioned solar power units.
ALP installed a 506 kilowattpeak (kWp) hybrid solar PV in 2018, a move that has seen them save more than Sh12 million every year.
Nairobi based Garden City Mall has also set up a Sh194.5 million solar carport to generate 1,256 megawatt hours annually to cut energy bills by Sh31.6 million per year.
