Denmark's Vestas to sign deal with Kenyan wind firm

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Lake Turkana Wind Power (LTWP), a firm planning to build a 300 MW windfarm in Kenya, said on Tuesday it had signed an exclusivity deal with Denmark's Vestas and would be signing a final agreement in October.

LTWP intends to erect at least 353 wind turbines, each with a capacity of 850 KW, which will be procured from the world's biggest maker of wind turbines, Vestas Wind Systems A/S.

"We have signed an exclusivity agreement with Vestas," LTWP's Chairman Carlo Van Wageningen told Reuters.

"We are now in the process of signing the actual EPC (engineering, construction and procurement) contract ... determining the proper value, all the details of the supply, along with (an) operations and management contract."

He said the company hopes to complete the deal before the end of October but declined to give more details until then.

LTWP plans to use Vestas V52 turbines and expects initial production to start in June 2011 and to have full production of 300 MW a year later.

It has already advertised for construction tenders to put up a 428 km (266 mile) power line and four substations to link the wind farm in a remote corner of Kenya to the national grid.

The total project cost is estimated at about $760 million, LTWP director Chris Staubo told Reuters in January. The African Development Bank had shown willingness to finance 30 percent of that, he had said.

Once completed, the project could meet about a quarter of Kenya's current energy demand.

Most of Kenya's power is generated by hydro-electric plants. But water levels have fallen due to consecutive seasons of insufficient rain and forced the east African nation into outages.

The country hopes to add 2,000 MW of environmentally-friendly energy sources by 2013.

The LTWP farm will be situated in the windy Loiyangalani area in north western Kenya where The Constant Gardner, a 2005 film based on John le Carre's novel of the same title, was partly shot.

(Editing by David Clarke)