Africa resists pressure to put emissions before growth

Africa resists pressure to put emissions before growth

As a boy, Sam Mamia, a Maasai from Kajiado county in southern Kenya, used to herd his father’s livestock on the hills around his house.

Now 34, he still works within sight of where he roamed as a child. “My home is there and my school was there,” he says, pointing to nearby fields where cows and goats are grazing. But the fields are now overshadowed by a 60-strong army of hulking white, gently humming wind turbines, each taller than a Boeing 747 is long.

As an engineer with a decade of experience at General Electric, Mamia is helping to run the 100-megawatt Kipeto wind farm, the second-largest in the country, built at a cost of $300mn.

Kipeto, 70km south of the capital, Nairobi, is part of a renewable energy mix that makes Kenya’s electricity supply greener than that of most countries in the west. Roughly 92 per cent of its electricity is generated from renewables, although Kenya has an installed capacity of just 2.9 gigawatts against 76GW in the UK. Geothermal and hydro energy each meet about a third of needs, with wind making up a further 13 per cent, according to Kenya’s Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority.

Kenya’s low-carbon economy is evidence