The Kenyan sole power producer will be seeking a consultant of global stature to help guide the project in terms of feasibility study, design and certification.

KenGen’s latest tender documents reveal that the chosen consultant will meet with the data centre’s stakeholders. They will then have to pick a location of the land as well as determine the necessary requirements.

“KenGen plans to build a new Tier IV Data Centre that can host mission-critical systems and provide colocation, business continuity and managed services facilities to local and international organizations; as an additional and diversified revenue stream,” says the firm in tender documents.

The prospective consultant will also be tasked with providing the centre’s architectural design and technical details. This includes power, cooling, physical security, cabling, communication and fire protection civil works.

The list of targeted customers will include firms that store large amounts of data and have to depend on the integrity of the store data for internal and external operations.

Additionally, this project is part of a bigger effort by KenGen to broaden its revenue streams from the traditional business of producing electricity and selling to Kenya Power for national supply.

Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and more are not new to this as they have their own huge data centres used for advanced computing and information storage. So it wouldn’t be a surprise to see KenGen try to reach out to such firms as potential consultants.

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According to The Standard, the Ministry of Energy could require real estate developers to begin incorporating electric car charging stations between 2020 and 2025.

This is part of the ministry’s desire to have a faster adoption of less polluting vehicles as the technology picks up with time.

In the strategy to boost the uptake of electric vehicles, the government now has plans to increase the number of electric vehicle imports to 5% of total imports. This would see the number of imported electric vehicles increase to about 16,000 per year.

Additionally, this will involve incentives to lower import duty for electric cars, bicycles and tuk-tuks and lower vehicle road taxes. It will also involve revision of the “building code to incorporate charging stations in public buildings and new estate”.

Top ministry official Isaac Kiva also revealed that the State is also in talks with other energy sector players to put up charging stations for electric vehicles.

“We are already talking to Kenya Power to see if we can facilitate the establishment of charging stations and what that is going to look like,” he said.

“This strategy is to guide the country towards achieving its established energy efficiency goals, which include reducing the national energy intensity by 2.8 per cent per year and enabling the country to achieve a 30 per cent emission reduction by 2030,” read the statement published by the Ministry of Energy.

This comes shortly after KenGen had revealed its plans to set up charging stations for electric vehicles.

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This was revealed by the company’s Strategy and Innovation Director David Muthike on Monday through a webinar convened by Energy Society of Kenya. The executive said that the firm is positioning itself to the possibilities of the rollout of electric public service vehicles. This is as the government also eyes to reduce the country’s reliance on diesel.

“The case to have electric vehicles is there and KenGen is ready to support that with renewable energy,” said Mr Muthike in the webinar.

“On innovation, we are exploring to participate in manufacturing and we have also rolled out charging infrastructure with a pilot within our premises.” However, no details about the facility’s location were revealed.

The project is also an effort by KenGen to generate revenue from electric car owners who require to recharge their vehicles. But we should consider the fact that the tech is still growing gradually in the country.

Electric vehicles have been gaining popularity in the U.S. and various European countries as the world turns to cut down on carbon emission. In Kenya though, the adoption of electric vehicles still struggles. Additionally, the tech faces various struggles like insufficient charging infrastructure and energy-storing batteries.

Hopefully, this project by the parastatal will open a gateway for electric vehicle ownership in the country.

After all, neighbouring nations like Rwanda are already collaborating with European automotive brands to inject the usage of electric vehicles.

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