murchr wrote:enyands wrote:Ericsson wrote:@enyands
You are in dreamland.
The more the oversupply the more expensive it gets because of paying for idle capacity.
@ericsson I think you are the one who needs to wake up. so when the jubilee govt is moving around telling people that the geothermal and solar has been commissioned to produce more electricity to bring the cost of stima chini that they are hallucinating. you are the one to wake up bro. 1st world countries eg USA,Canada have over supply of stima and its way cheaper than kenya and guess why its cheaper,well because they have many producers who are trying to be competitive enough on each other for the states to purchase from them,
so continue hallucinating with the theory of "over supply will make it more expensive" but in real world its the other way round but in dreamland is where your thoughts lie
Yenyewe coming to think about it, that oversupply theory is not making sense.
In the western world, electricity is more expensive during the summer and winter months and cheaper when the temps are normal because the population is not consuming as much energy to cool and heat their houses...again, it doesn't make sense to even imagine that companies will produce electricity and stare at everyone because they cant sell it....as Cde points out we are connecting the Kenyan grid with the SA grid are there no customers in between?
Even if KPLC decides to pay just fixed costs to IPPs it would make sense for them to actually sell electricity.
Yes, the IPPs would rather sell (for extra income) power than just be paid the 'capacity charge' but KPLC (or KETRACO) has to be in a position to transmit that power to consumers. Despite what one thinks, the primary consumer isn't the residential/office consumer but industrial consumers.
We are actively killing off our industries by over-taxing (NHIF, NSSF, etc) and over-regulating (licenses, corruption, NEMA, COTU, etc) them. Add the cost of financing which is over 20% p.a. and poor infrastructure. It is much easier to manufacture in Egypt, China or India & import into Kenya.
Most 'rural' consumers are (unfortunately) a net loss to KPLC as they typically consume less than 200 kW (of which 50 kW are subsidized) per household.
KPLC does have 'suppressed' demand which will be sorted out with the projects coming online by 2016.
Greedy when others are fearful. Very fearful when others are greedy - to paraphrase Warren Buffett