The race by technology firms to set up multi-billion-shilling power-draining data centres in Kenya gives a timely boost to the government’s efforts to grow local power consumption and potentially lower the burden of high electricity costs.
Some of the major companies that have built data centres in the country include EADC Liquid, iColo, Konza Technology City, Africa Data Centre (ADC), COMTEC, Access, Safaricom, MTN Business, and Telkom Kenya.
The high electricity consumption by these data centres is a welcome boost to Kenya Power which has been recording a modest increase in electricity demand hurting its revenues.
A task force appointed by former President Uhuru Kenyatta to probe these PPAs however noted that demand has failed to increase as expected and puts consumers in danger of high power costs.
The task force warned of the increased power costs consumers would face in higher tariffs over the delay in the building of large flagship projects and limited manufacturing that makes it impossible for Kenya Power to absorb the cost of all these new projects.
The higher demand being brought by data centres is however helping plug the demand gap lessening the burden of capacity charges where consumers pay for idle power.
The demand for data centres has grown exponentially in recent years due to a sharp growth in demand for internet and cloud-based services, and this demand has piqued the interest of global financiers who are sinking billions of shillings in data centres.
With this demand, companies running data centres are planning to open new data centres, especially in Nairobi and Mombasa to meet the growing demand.Smart Company the firm will invest $200 million (Sh24.57 billion) to build three new data centres within the next 18 months.
Two of these will be built in Nairobi and another in Kigali, Rwanda with the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) as one of its investors.
“We have acquired land next to our existing data centre (at Sameer Business Park) to build a 20MW new data centre which will help us to meet the growing demand for our services. We will have a groundbreaking for the project early next year,” said Mr Kwach.
The data centre is also connected to a 1MW solar plant to supplement its grid power.
iColo chief executive officer Ranjith Cherickel said its data centre in Nairobi can consume up to 10MW, and MBA2 in Nyali can use up to 1.6MW with the planned data centre expected to further raise its demand for power.
“We expect demand for data centre services to continue growing which is why we are readily positioning ourselves to provide these services with the new data centre that will be adjacent to this one (MBA2),” said Mr Cherickel.
