Why Kenya's north generates power it's not allowed to use
Switch on a light in Nairobi tonight and there is a fair chance the electricity was born in a desert. It travelled 428km down a high-voltage line from Loyangalani in Marsabit, where 365 turbines churn out one of the most reliable wind corridors on earth. Africa's largest wind farm is in Laisamis constituency, where household electricity access is 1.3 per cent, and in neighbouring North Horr it is one per cent.
The inequality is stark, though not for want of effort. Power does reach the north, and Kenya leads the region in off-grid solar, but supply thins sharply beyond the key towns' boundaries. Turkana County has 10 per cent household electricity access in the republic at 8.8 per cent, in West Pokot it's 11.9 per cent, Samburu and Wajir both 14.6 per cent, against Nairobi's 96.7 per cent. National access has climbed from less than 30 per cent in 2013 to about 75 per cent today, but the gap has not closed.
96.7% Household electricity access in Nairobi
75% National electricity access (up from 30% in 2013)
This is no accident of geography. It is a design choice, and the north hosts two monuments to it. The Ladalangani-Suswa line exists to move Marsabit's electricity to a substation in Narok. The Eastern electricity highway does the same for Ethiopia's, crossing at the border at Moyale and running south through Marsabit, Samburu and Isiolo before terminating, again, at Suswa. More than a 1,000km of high-voltage lines now cross the least electrified counties in Kenya. Neither line was designed for local supply.
In the year to June last year, Kenya used 14,472 gigawatt hours of electricity and produced 12,938. The shortfall of 1,534 GWh - a 10th of everything we consumed - was bought from our neighbours, 83 per cent of it from Ethiopia, at a cost that nearly tripled to $88.06 billion.
Of what we generate ourselves, geothermal supplies 5,718 gigawatt hours or 44.2 per cent, hydro with 3,303, or 27.1 per cent, wind 1,908, or 14.7 per cent and solar, thermal and cogeneration provide 14 per cent. The bulk of that wind blows in one place: Loyangalani, in Marsabit. Kenya's wind farms, dominated by Marsabit, produce more electricity than the entire shortfall. In fact, three neighbouring countries. Add the Garissa solar plant, the largest grid-connected array in East and Central Africa, and the north is not a peripheral contributor to the grid. It is its pillar. It is also its orphan.
12,938 GWh Electricity produced locally
$88.06 Billion Cost of electricity imports (nearly tripled)
Geothermal is slow and costly to drill, while hydro, our second source, is hostage to rainfall in a warming climate. Kenya's reddest headroom is wind and solar, and the best of both lies in the north: the Turkana corridor carries some of the steadiest wind on earth, and the drylands, the country's strongest solar irradiation. Now that our grid connects Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania, that resource is not merely national. It is regional.
Marsabit, Turkana, Wajir, Mandera and Garissa, operate on off-grid networks powered mainly by diesel generators, within a 30-kilometre radius of each plant. In the year to June 2025, these networks consumed 880GWh between them. The wind farm at Loyangalani, delivered more than 15 times as much - into a line running south. Moyale burns trucked diesel while Ethiopian hydro-power cruises past, destined for a substation on its way to Nairobi. Whatever explains that, it is not scarcity.
The Ethiopian link makes the point poignant. It is a 500-kilovolt direct current bi-pole, and direct current cannot be tapped along its route. Drawing power off requires a converter station, and there are exactly two, at Soda (Ethiopia), and Suswa (Narok). Financed at $1.26 billion by the World Bank, the African Development Bank and our own Treasury, serving the communities beneath was simply never part of the specification.
Electricity is the binding constraint on every northern value chain, and the constraint is one of reach and reliability rather than absence. Cold chains run in the main towns but rarely beyond them, so milk from a region holding 70 per cent of the national herd still spoils on the road to market. Irrigation along the Tana, Turkewel and Dawa rivers runs largely on diesel, at several times grid cost. Gums and resins leave the country unprocessed because milling needs steady three-phase power.
Clinics with solar panels can refrigerate medicine but not run a theatre. Every argument for northern potential - livestock, minerals, tourism, carbon, Lapsset - depends on power supply that is firm, affordable and present where value is created. It is not a technical question. It is a project question. The Ethiopian link needs a converter station of the kind that cost Sh75 billion at Suswa. But the Loyangalani line is alternating current, and can be tapped with ordinary substations at a fraction of that cost. Build them, at Marsabit and along the corridor, and write local supply into every future licence.
Convert the northern diesel stations to anchors, harden them with solar, and aim mini-grids at productive use because a mini-grid with an anchor customer draws capital without subsidy. And require multi-terminal capability in every future high voltage line, so that tapping is not an exclusion is never again welded into a specification.
