Augmenting Climate-Resilient Energy infrastructure through Local and International Standards for Renewables

Abstract

Kenya’s Energy sector has an installed capacity of 3.601 GW (grid-connected 3.321 GW and captive 280.76 MW), with 80.48% contributed directly from Renewable energy sources. This huge percentage of renewable in the energy mix however is not reflected in the adoption or development of Standards. Such Standards help in enhancing the safety and efficiency of products, security and quality assurance while ensuring interconnectivity and interoperability of components. Standards enable the dissemination of new technologies, good practices and ultimately a climate-resilient energy infrastructure (CREI). To achieve CREI, standards act as a catalyst for advancing the attainment of economies of scale for renewables while also providing technical specifications and standardizations to accelerate its deployment.  This study thus addresses the ominous gap that exists of lack of a proper standards inventory across all renewables. In this way, this work addresses the irregular and at times inconsistent gap of the direct causal link between policy and standards on one side and application areas such as management, information systems and social use of renewable energy. The study employed the Mixed Methods Research (MMR) approach to enable an understanding of the Renewable Energy (RE) standards environment in Kenya.  In addition, realistic literature reviews and meta-analysis literature reviews were employed to deal with complex interventions of standards within the renewable energy sector. The study demonstrated that in the majority of Renewable Energy Technologies (RETs), major gaps in terms of standards for various RETs exist, the import of this being that the majority of RETs cannot be manufactured locally. The study also concludes that a low awareness exists of standard implementation, further due to a lack of awareness of the technological innovations on the global levels, development of local standards and capacity building of competent staff (including techno-financial support to renewable energy technologies), has been significantly hampered. Subsequently, the study does appreciate the role of universities and higher educational institutions to be central in the renewable energy technologies research and analysis as well as the adoption of adaptation and/or adoption of local and international standards.