Yes; we have enough electricity to migrate to electric vehicles

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

07 September 2025

Upon reading last week’s article on the amount of electricity needed to fully electrify all our motor vehicles, Githuku Mungai was left a little confused. He writes: “You showed the equivalence between what one litre of petrol gives and what we get from electricity. Why the link? Do they use cost of petrol to cost electricity?”

Last week’s article had nothing to do with money at all. It was only about the quantity of energy extracted from petrol by our cars. From the total volume of petrol that we consume annually (4.5 billion litres), I worked out the total energy content (144 billion megajoules). But engines waste most of this energy (70 per cent), so only 43 billion MJ actually goes to moving the cars.

The next step was to find out how much electricity would be required to replace the petrol if all our motor vehicles were electric. This is the reason for the equivalence. It has nothing to do with cost. We are currently using one source of energy (petrol) now we are thinking about changing to a different source (electricity). How much of the new one will be required?

I hope this is now clear…

Another anonymous reader expressed concern that Kenya doesn’t even have enough electricity to meet current demand, let alone for the coming electric vehicles. Well, nothing could be farther from the truth! Right now, we have excess supply. The highest peak demand ever witnessed in Kenya’s history was recorded on 5th August 2025 at 2,363.41 megawatts (MW). This is far below the total installed generating capacity of 3,812MW as at 31st December 2024.

Clearly, we still have a headroom of 1,449MW; in other words, the highest peak demand ever recorded in our history is just 62 per cent of our installed capacity. Nevertheless, as noted last week, we should not be complacent about it. We must keep building new generating stations.

Now; most EV owners charge them at home because it is not only cheaper and more convenient but also better for the battery than public fast charging stations. Home chargers draw about 7kW of electricity. Therefore, our current reserve of 1,449MW is enough to charge about 200,000 EVs all plugged in at the same time!

We have about two million cars on the road (nobody knows the exact number, not even the registrar of motor vehicles!), so, at the moment, we have enough reserve electricity for about 10pc of our fleet.