Kenya Pipeline Company
Eight pipeline stations, one decision-support framework, built so leadership could prioritise capital with confidence.
Kenya Pipeline Company engaged Kinawa Energy to assess the technical and financial viability of solar integration across eight strategic pipeline stations. The brief was explicit: produce a feasibility deliverable that an executive and board could act on, not a stack of generic site reports. The output is now used as the reference framework for staged renewable integration planning at national infrastructure scale.
Strategic infrastructure, mixed site conditions, no consolidated baseline.
Kenya Pipeline operates strategic national fuel-transport infrastructure where reliability is non-negotiable. Each station has its own electrical demand profile, its own land and rooftop constraints, and its own connection to the grid, meaning a "headline kWp number" is meaningless without site-by-site grounding.
Before the engagement, leadership had received fragmented internal estimates and vendor pitches, none of which reconciled to a single financial model. The challenge was not deciding whether solar made sense in principle. It was producing a defensible, station-by-station business case that could be sequenced into a multi-year capital plan.
Site suitability first, sizing second, financial model last, in that order.
Kinawa structured the work as a four-stage feasibility, with each stage's output gating the next. That sequencing prevented the most common failure mode in feasibility work: oversized PVSyst models with no relationship to the site's actual roof area, structural capacity, or shading.
- Site suitability assessment. Irradiance, available roof and ground area, structural capacity, shading, and grid-tie point conditions for each of the 8 stations.
- Technical sizing. Load profiles, daytime energy match, and PV system sizing per station, with sensitivity ranges rather than single-point numbers.
- Economic viability. CAPEX, OPEX, KPLC tariff exposure, payback, NPV and IRR per site, plus the consolidated network view.
- Implementation recommendations. Sequencing logic, contracting strategy options, and risks to manage at procurement.
A decision-grade framework, not a stack of vendor pitches.
The deliverable gave Kenya Pipeline's leadership a single, internally consistent view of all eight stations: which sites should move first, which require structural work before any PV is appropriate, and what each phase costs and returns. The framework is now the reference document for staged renewable integration planning across the network.
"Kinawa's independence is the reason we trusted the numbers. The deliverable was structured as a decision tool, not a sales document."
