Africa’s Largest Wind Farm, Lake Turkana Wind project (LTWP), is set to undergo capacity optimization to boost its production and realize its potential opportunities.
LTWP has partnered with assessment software firm, Clir, who will analyze data from each of Lake Turkana’s 365 turbines, to enhance LTWP’s wind farm performance tracking and support its team in realizing opportunities.
With the wind farm now operational, the focus is on ensuring that Lake Turkana Wind project is able to take full advantage of this optimal resource, and, ultimately deliver high yield returns for its investors.
LTWP is Africa’s biggest wind power plant, a massive project that now provides nearly a fifth of the country’s energy needs.
“Lake Turkana is a particularly unique project, the first of this scale in Africa, having worked across a number of large-scale projects around the world, we are keen to leverage our wide-ranging experience to assess Lake Turkana’s current performance and potential gains,” said David O’Hare, Director, Europe, Clir.
The wind farm has 365 turbines – each with a capacity of 850kW and is said to be the most efficient in the world with 68 per cent load capacity factor and an installed capacity of 310.25 megawatts of clean, reliable, low-cost energy.
READ: Africa’s biggest wind power plant launched in Kenya
The project is part of Kenya’s commitment to meet a growing demand for electricity with 100 per cent renewable generation, in order to bring down both national emissions and electricity costs.
Clir, through its machine learning-driven analysis will be able to see through the ‘noise’ of resource fluctuation and identify any instances of underperformance and their causes, providing LTWP with the insights necessary to increase annual energy production, monitor asset health and manage technical financial risk.
Clir’s team will further use this analysis to compare individual asset performance at a project, portfolio, and industry level, with insights shared with all project stakeholders via Clir’s reporting function.
According to Wellington Otieno, Chief Technical Officer, LTWP – Clir will support the LTWP team of local technicians with the most up-to-date digital tools and analytics to target operations and maintenance and cut unnecessary asset downtime.
“With our turbines performing at their best, we will be in a position to supply Kenya with consistent, low-priced, green energy. We are pioneering wind energy generation at scale in Africa, and look forward to working with Clir to fully optimize performance and show the rest of the continent, and indeed the world, what green energy possibilities there are here,” he said.
Clir Renewables is a renewable energy Software as a Service (SaaS) provider whose industry-leading, cloud-based tools that enable project stakeholders to maximize production, monitor asset health and manage technical financial risk.
