Policy Review Energy Governance
Kenya's Energy Policy, At a Crossroads: The Tension Between Renewables and Fossil Fuels
Blog By Bonga Na Gava • Kenya National Energy Policy 2025–2034
Kenya stands at a crossroads in its energy journey. With the National Energy Policy 2025–2034, the country is presenting one of its most ambitious attempts yet to reshape how energy is produced, distributed, and consumed. The policy sets out a wide-ranging vision: expanding renewable energy, achieving universal electricity and clean cooking access by 2030, strengthening regional energy trade, modernising infrastructure, improving efficiency and conservation, mobilising financing, reforming procurement, and advancing green industrialisation.
It is anchored on four guiding principles: sustainability and climate action, energy equity and inclusivity, economic development, and good governance. On paper, this is a future-facing framework that speaks strongly to a just energy transition. The real question, however, is whether the policy can deliver on these guiding principles in practice — especially in a country where energy demand is rising quickly and the system is already under pressure.
A System Under Pressure
Kenya’s energy reality is deeply uneven. Electricity and petroleum dominate industrial and transport use, while over 60% of households still rely on biomass for cooking, with serious environmental and health impacts. At the same time, rapid urbanisation, industrial growth, and digitalisation are pushing energy demand beyond existing system capacity. This creates pressure not only on generation, but also on transmission, distribution, and planning. It is within this gap between ambition and reality that the policy must be understood.
When the objectives are unpacked, a clearer picture emerges of both progress and tension. On renewable energy, the policy strongly supports hydropower, geothermal, wind, and solar expansion. However, implementation is uneven: hydropower remains infrastructure heavy and needs stronger environmental safeguards, geothermal is more structured but still supply-driven, while wind and solar lack full integration with grid readiness, storage, and dispatch systems.
Nuclear Energy and the Question of Capacity
On universal electricity and clean cooking access, the policy includes nuclear energy as a future baseload source — although it is highly centralised, capital intensive, and heavily dependent on long-term institutional and technical capacity that Kenya is still developing. It also introduces challenges around radioactive waste management, safety oversight, and long-term environmental liability, which sit uneasily alongside the country’s strong renewable energy advantage.
The Fossil Fuel Contradiction
Coal and natural gas remain part of the energy mix. Coal is presented as a way to support industrial energy needs, and this agenda sits in clear contradiction with both global energy trends and the country’s own renewable energy trajectory. The implementation plan frames coal as a locally available resource to support industrial needs such as cement, steel, and ceramics, backed by a proposed legal and regulatory framework and a master plan for exploration and production.
This framing is fundamentally misaligned with the urgent need to transition toward clean, low-carbon energy systems.
From an environmental and systems perspective, coal is not a viable option for Kenya’s energy future. Even with references to regulation and “clean coal technologies,” coal remains one of the most polluting energy sources — driving land degradation, water pollution, poor air quality, and long-term health impacts on communities. It also carries high risks of displacement and environmental injustice, especially in extraction areas. At the same time, global finance is rapidly exiting coal, making it an increasingly stranded and high-risk investment.
Natural gas is framed as a transition fuel, but it still extends dependence on fossil systems and risks delaying a full shift to renewables. Together, they create a tension between a clean energy pathway and a carbon-heavy backup path that may become harder to reverse.
Land: The Missing Centrepiece
Land is where all of this becomes real. Every energy project — whether renewable, fossil-based, or nuclear — depends on land. But land is not empty space; it is where communities live and ecosystems exist. Across the policy, land is still treated mainly as a technical step for infrastructure, rather than a core environmental and social issue. This creates risks of displacement, delayed compensation, and ecosystem fragmentation, especially when wayleaves and easements are not planned early.
If energy expansion continues without putting land at the centre of planning, then energy projects risk being unjust — no matter how clean the source.
Infrastructure, Financing, and Systemic Gaps
As the policy moves into areas like regional energy trade, financing, procurement, and infrastructure development, transmission expansion is strong — but system operations like real-time balancing and storage are still weak. Financing reforms are ambitious, but constrained by project readiness, risk, and coordination gaps. Procurement reforms aim to improve transparency, but challenges like currency exposure and weak institutional alignment remain. Across all of this, the system is still more focused on building infrastructure than ensuring it works as a fully integrated, flexible energy system.
Green Industrialisation: Opportunity and Complexity
The green industrialisation agenda adds another layer of complexity. Green hydrogen and critical minerals are positioned as future growth drivers. Green hydrogen is generally a clean energy pathway when produced using renewable energy; if well implemented, it could reduce reliance on fossil fuels in hard-to-abate sectors like industry and transport. A strong environmental approach would sequence development carefully, minimise ecological disruption, and ensure that every major investment is tied to real, proven decarbonisation demand.
The critical minerals agenda reflects strong alignment with global demand for energy transition materials. However, prioritising exploration and extraction over industrial transformation leaves a gap — and this is where Variable Renewable Energy (VREs) like wind and solar offer a clearer and more immediate opportunity. By combining VREs with Energy Storage Systems (ESS), stronger grid management, and flexible power systems, Kenya can build a reliable and clean energy base that supports both industry and everyday use.
The Direction Ahead
In its current form, the policy does not fully go far enough to deliver on its own vision or consistently stand on its guiding principles. The continued inclusion of coal and the expansion of natural gas reveal a deeper hesitation to fully commit to a low-carbon pathway, creating a dual reality that weakens the policy’s environmental credibility. At the same time, land — arguably the most critical foundation of the entire energy transition — is not treated with the urgency or protection required to safeguard communities and ecosystems. For the policy to truly deliver, it must move beyond balancing competing pathways and instead make deliberate, firm choices: fully prioritising renewable energy, embedding environmental and social safeguards at the core of decision-making, and aligning financing, infrastructure, and governance with a single, coherent transition pathway.
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