The dusty town of Naivasha sits within the Great Rift Valley, where the African continent is being divided into two. About 90 kilometers northwest of Kenya’s capital city of Nairobi, Naivasha welcomes gaggles of tourists each year trekking to Hell’s Gate National Park.
But regional interest is growing, especially as Africa works toward universal energy access by 2030, in accordance with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Roughly 43 percent of the continent’s population, equaling about 600 million people, lacks access to electricity. A 2021 analysis by the Dalberg consulting firm in partnership with the U.N.
In East Africa, geothermal energy is an attractive option. It’s abundant thanks to the East African Rift System, which brings heat toward the surface. Like other renewable energies such as wind and solar, geothermal doesn’t emit carbon dioxide. And it comes with extra benefits. “Geothermal power is reliable,” says Anna Mwangi, senior geophysicist at the Kenya Electricity Generating Company, or KenGen, the government entity that operates Olkaria .
Globally, geothermal resources are often found along the boundaries of tectonic plates, such as around the Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fire. In Africa, a bounty of geothermal resources exist where a new boundary is forming: the East African Rift System. The exact start of the system is not clearly defined; it originates on the Arabian Peninsula before running south along the Red Sea and into Djibouti.
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