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{
    "id": 1511528,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1511528/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 604,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Mwala, UDA",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Vincent Musau",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "definitely enrich our Report. I have heard their concerns, which is the reason we were doing this inquiry in the first place. The cheapest power in the world is from Venezuela. Our power is 2,000 per cent higher than Venezuela’s; that is basically 21 times higher! It is crazy. Some of these things are carefully addressed in the Report. We look forward to working closely with the Committee on Implementation. As the Departmental Committee on Energy, we intend to have each and every one of these specific recommendations implemented. We will do a follow- up on every single one of them. An issue has been raised on the cost effectiveness of battery storage systems. First of all, the Committee talks of energy storage solutions, and not battery storage. The cost of battery storage has been going down and so is that of solar panels. The costs have significantly been going down every other day. The House should note that there are many other emerging technologies like green hydrogen. Tonight, we will be wasting lots of megawatts of power equivalent to steam by having to open up venting. We have to waste steam tonight because we do not know where to take it. The system must have certain levels of voltages. If you oversupply beyond demand, you burn the equipment. This means there is power that we waste at some point in time. Why can we not store it? When you look at our demand curve, during the day we have an excess of about 500MW, which we pay for anyway because we signed dubious take-or-pay agreements. Hon. Temporary Speaker, in the evening, around the picking time, we are almost load shedding. This means that Kenyans can even get blackouts because of power rationing, yet we wasted 500 megawatts during the day. Store this power. It is cheaper to store it than using expensive power or thermal generators in the evening. One last statistics which is important for this House is that we are not against Independent Power Producers, but they must do fair business in this country. Thirty per cent of the power Kenyans consume come from IPPs. Seventy per cent of it comes from Kenya Electricity Generating (KenGen) Company which is a Government parastatal. The 70 per cent that we get from KenGen is cheaper than the 30 per cent that we get from IPPs. KenGen supplies us with 70 per cent of the power, but we pay them less than the 30 per cent being supplied by IPPs. Honestly, it cannot work like that. I wish to summarise it like that. There is also a Member who talked about killing monopoly. The moment we expose this matter and the indicative tariffs and Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) become a subject of discussion by the National Assembly, then the competition has already come in. There is no way this House will pass dubious contracts. We have two policies that we operate on: Feed-in Tariff and auction. Feed-in Tariff says that the Ministry can gazette tariffs and people can supply power as long as they do not exceed the tariff gazetted by Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (EPRA). But, what happens? People collude and gazette tariffs that are already high and get their friends to supply the power. If we open the market and tell them to go for the auction policy, it is an open tender. What is going to happen? Again, they are also likely to manipulate the process through the technical evaluation. What are we telling them? We are telling them we are going to use both indicative tariffs and competition through the auction policy. This is how it will be implemented. EPRA will bring indicative tariffs for discussion by this Parliament; the ceilings of which you cannot exceed. People will be told to compete as long as they do not reach those ceilings and we get the lowest tariffs like what Kenya Rural Roads Authority (KeRRA) does. You already know how much a road will cost and the budget. However, you compete against a known budget and you always get the lowest of the bids. Finally, on monopoly, there is what we call captive power and net-metering. Captive power has already been done by some of the companies and schools. You can install solar panels in your institution or company. Many Kenyans have solar installations that they do not use during the day. We want you to sell that power during the day. Feed it to Kenya Power and"
}