Kenya, just like other developing countries of the world, is energy deficient. Power supply is characterized by flaws including inaccessibility by marginalized rural communities, high cost of electricity, power outages, and over-reliance on biomass and hydropower sources. Despite these trends, the country has great potential to produce green energy including wind, biofuels, solar, and geothermal power in excess of the entire country's demand. This chapter explores the status of each of these green energy sources and their production potential using in Kenya. Findings show that the production capacity for all of the sources is high though limited tapping and harnessing of these energy resources is done. This could be attributable to lack of exploitation technology and expertise, huge capital investments involved and the uncertainty on the effects of these renewable energy sources to food and water security. For optimal exploitation, Kenya must invest in the energy sector hugely to enhance technical know-how on its development and cater for the associated financial opportunity costs.
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Natural resources such as geothermal heat, tides, rain, wind and sunlight provide green energy. Green energy is a derivative of natural processes whose replenishment is constant. Approximately 16% of energy consumption worldwide comes from these green sources, 10% is sourced from traditional biomass, which is important in heating processes and 3.4% is hydropower (UNEP, 2011). In 2013, renewables with exception of hydropower accounted for 8.5% of the generated electricity worldwide and this figure rose up to 9.1% in 2014 and was equivalent to $270.3 billion investment in these power sources (McCrone, 2015). Approximately 19% of electricity sources is from green energy with 16% being from hydropower and 3% from other new renewable sources in developing countries such as Kenya (Kimuyu et al., 2015). Equally, the investment on these green technologies has risen by 32% and as of 2010, more than US$211 billion had been invested on these technologies and processes worldwide. In Africa, investment on green technologies rose from US$750 million to US$3.6 billion, largely because of investments by Kenya and Egypt (Kimuyu et al., 2015). The increased awareness on the need for sustainability due to high pollution tendencies, climate variation and change, increased energy demands, global warming and natural resources depletion have prompted these use of renewables (Mahmure et al., 2015). The increased uptake of green technologies has facilitated the growth of these energy sources all over the world. The World Economic Forum ascertained this supposition and suggested that green energy sources have been critical in the last decade in bridging the energy deficiency gap for about 1.3 billion people worldwide in the wake of emerging markets, which require huge energy inputs (McCrone, 2015).
Kenya in particular is endowed with a variety of green energy sources including bio-fuel, geothermal, hydropower, wind, solar and biomass although their use is limited. In recent times, the expansion of the green energy sector is on rise in the country with the growing need and rising cost of electricity, gas prices, global oil and the pressure to be environmentally stable (Kiplagat et al., 2011). In Kenya, the three main sources of energy are electricity, petroleum and biomass accounting for 5.5, 19.1 and 74.6% of total consumption, respectively (Kiplagat et al., 2011). The sector is characterised by over-reliance on biomass, inaccessibility to modern green technologies, power outages, inability to meet existent energy demand especially in marginalised areas and over-dependence on hydropower. Green energy technologies are foreseen bridges to close these gaps and are potentials to sustainable economic growth, which is environmentally sensitive. This book chapter therefore explains the status of the energy sector and the role of existent green technologies in promoting sustainable economic growth using Kenya as the case study.