Kenya wind project has plenty of cash pledges

By Helen Nyambura-Mwaura

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Lake Turkana Wind Power (LTWP), which is planning a 300 MW wind development in Kenya, has more than enough pledges for the 560 million euro project but is yet to confirm lenders, a director said on Thursday.

Chris Staubo told Reuters the company had received offers totaling 780 million euros.

"We are pretty much on target. We have pledges from all the lenders, equity and debt are all in place but we have not yet reached financial close, which we should reach sometime end of October, November," he said.

Denmark's Vestas Wind Systems will supply nearly 360 turbines and Kenya's monopoly electricity distributor will purchase the power at a feed-in tariff of 7.22 euro cents.

Things were on the back burner at the moment because most of the parties are on holiday, he said.

"From the pledges that we have, we are oversubscribed," Staubo said. "We are waiting to have another lenders conference when we actually select four or five parties out of the nine people to actually form the debt consortium."

In march, LTWP's chairman said the shareholding structure was 51 percent for London-based energy Aldwych, 19 percent for South Africa's Industrical Development Corporation and a 30 percent stake for KP&P, the original owners.

Staubo said the project, in which the African Development Bank is the lead arranger, has 70:30 debt to equity ratio.

Once complete, the project situated in a remote and windy corner in northwest Kenya will be Africa's biggest wind farm. It will provide about a quarter of Kenya's current electricity needs.

Kenya has the potential to tap several forms of renewable energy sources such as solar and geothermal, but has failed to develop them over the years and instead depended heavily on unreliable hydroelectricity.