A coal plant made in China
Across a narrow channel from this historic port town, where baobabs tower over the forest and tiny crabs skitter in and out of the mangroves, Kenya could soon get its first coal-fired power plant, courtesy of China.
The plan’s champions, including senior Kenyan officials, say the plant will help meet fast-growing demand for electricity and draw investment. Its critics worry it will damage the area’s fragile marine ecosystem, threaten fishing communities and pollute the air.
The battle over the project, which is frozen pending the outcome of a court case, reverberates far beyond Lamu, a 700-year-old Indian Ocean port town of coral-lime houses and carved wooden doors that has been designated a UNESCO world heritage site.
The plan embodies a contradiction of Chinese global climate leadership: The country’s huge coal sector is turning outward in search of new markets as projects contract at home. A Chinese multinational is tapped to build the $2-billion (U.S.), 394-hectare project, and a Chinese bank is helping finance it. The project is among hundreds that Chinese companies are helping to build or finance around the world.
It represents a test for Kenya as well. While its leaders describe the Lamu plant as a source of cheap, reliable electricity, the country is also seeking to become a renewable-energy hub, with huge solar and wind projects in the works and a promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent by 2030. Coal could upend those goals. “I see no reason for them to do it,” said Erik Solheim, head of the UN Environment Program, which is based in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. “They should invest heavily in hydro, solar, wind. They are already, but they could do even more.”
Not least, Solheim said in an interview, the rapidly falling price of renewable energy sources makes a coal-fired power project “much less viable.”
According to the Global Coal Tracker, a monitoring group, more than 200 coal-fired power plants are being developed or financed by Chinese companies from Mongolia to Zimbabwe, including in countries that, like Kenya, had previously burned no coal.
Power China, the Chinese multinational in line to build the Lamu plant, has also constructed coal plants in Indonesia and Pakistan. Urgewald, a tracking group that pushes for divestment from the coal sector, lists Power China as the 12th-largest developer of coal plants in the world.
“As China has reduced its dependence on coal domestically, it has expanded overseas, to relieve excess domestic capacity,” said Katharine Lu, who researches energy investments at Friends of the Earth, an environmental lobby group.
Geopolitics is also a key factor in that expansion. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a central part of President Xi Jinping’s strategy to increase his country’s global influence through infrastructure projects abroad. The United States, for its part, continues to export coal, as coal-fired power plants shrink at home.