Lake Turkana Wind Power, Clir to enhance Africa’s largest wind farm

Clir Renewables has announced a partnership agreement with Lake Turkana Wind Power (LTWP), leaders in African renewable energy generation.

The company said it will enhance LTWP’s wind farm performance tracking and support its Kenya-based team. Clir Renewables is a Software as a Service company in the renewable energy industry. The cloud-based AI platform provides asset managers and owners with tools to maximize annual energy production.

Founded in early 2017, Clir’s proprietary algorithm cleans and analyses ingested data to provide insights. Kenya has committed to meeting a growing demand for electricity with 100% renewable generation, in order to bring down both national emissions and electricity costs.

The wind farm is now operational, and LTWP has turned its focus on ensuring that it is able to take full advantage of this resource.

With the usage of machine learning-driven analysis, Clir will be able to see through resource fluctuation and identify any instances of underperformance and their causes, the company claim.

David O’Hare, Director, Europe, at Clir said, “Lake Turkana is a particularly unique project – it’s the first of this scale in Africa and has been developed to take advantage of some of the best conditions for consistent energy production.

“Having worked across a number of large-scale, unique projects around the world, we are keen to leverage our wide-ranging experience to assess Lake Turkana’s current performance and potential gains.

“We are delighted to provide access to our industry-leading analytics and the team’s global expertise in support of LTWP as it realises the full potential of this project and the region’s incredible resource, both in terms of energy generation and resulting returns – a share of which we are delighted to see has been committed to the company’s corporate social responsibility arm, the ‘Winds of Change Foundation’.”

Clir’s team will use the 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.

“We are committed to making sure this project produces beyond our expectations,” said Wellington Otieno, Chief Technical Officer, LTWP.

“With Clir, our team of local technicians will be supported 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 optimise performance and show the rest of the continent, and indeed the world, what green energy possibilities there are here.

“Our hope is that LTWP will encourage many more wind energy farms in our continent as we work towards protecting our environment.”