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Narendra Raval's cement company has applied to build a 60 megawatt wind farm in Kajiado County, its second wind project and the largest piece yet of a long effort to stop buying electricity from the national utility.
National Cement, the Devki Group subsidiary that makes Simba Cement, filed an environmental and social impact assessment with Kenya's National Environment Management Authority. The plan covers 38 turbines, a 33/220-kilovolt step-up substation, internal access roads, underground and overhead cabling, and a 220kV transmission line with its wayleave.
Kajiado is the county immediately south of Nairobi, running down to the Tanzanian border. The regulator has opened a 30-day window for public comment.
Why a cement maker wants its own power station is a matter of arithmetic. Grinding limestone and clinker is among the most electricity-intensive industrial processes there is, and National Cement said in an earlier filing that buying from Kenya Power cost substantially more than generating its own, while interruptions to supply could stop clinker production outright.
It has been solving that problem for years. The company commissioned a 15 megawatt plant beside its clinker operation between Merrueshi and Mbirikani, both in Kajiado, in 2018 to cut its electricity bill. It announced a separate 60 megawatt wind project at Sebit in West Pokot, in Kenya's far north-west near the Ugandan border, in 2023, and that one remains listed as pre-construction.
The Kajiado filing does not say where the power will go. It states neither whether National Cement will consume all of it nor whether any will be sold into the national grid.
Raval built Devki from a steel rolling mill and it now spans cement, steel and other manufacturing across Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda. Owning generation rather than buying it removes one of the largest variable costs from every tonne he produces, and it removes a supplier he cannot control.
His competitors have reached the same conclusion. Mombasa Cement has pursued captive generation at its Vipingo plant north of Mombasa, including a proposed 10 megawatt coal and biomass unit, and Bamburi Cement has been building solar. Kenya Power has itself acknowledged that large consumers are moving to self-generation to control their energy costs.
The economics favour it. Kenya has strong wind and solar resources and the cost of building renewable capacity has fallen steadily.
Wind now supplies 13.18% of Kenya's electricity, its third-largest source after geothermal and hydropower. Almost all of that comes from Lake Turkana Wind Power, whose 310 megawatt farm sits in Marsabit County in the arid north, near the lake it is named after. The 100 megawatt Kipeto farm is in Kajiado itself, about 70 kilometres south-west of Nairobi, and the 25.5 megawatt Ngong farm sits on the hills just outside the capital.
Building in Kajiado puts Raval on the same wind corridor that already carries the country's second-largest wind farm. Completing both his projects would give him more wind capacity than Kipeto has.
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