Ferocious hot winds have blasted the barren and rocky landscape at Lake Turkana in northern Kenya for thousands of years. They blow relentlessly through the Turkana corridor, funnelled and pushed faster still by towering mountains 24 hours a day, 12 months of the year. Now this volcanic wilderness is at the forefront of Africa’s green revolution under plans to plant 365 giant wind turbines in ground where the cracked remains of ancient lava flows fit together like a puzzle.

The Dutch-led consortium behind Africa’s biggest wind farm says its unique bounty is as rich as any mine or oilfield and promises higher returns than comparable projects in Europe. It is also more reliable than hydro power, which still accounts for 60% of Kenya’s already green energy mix but which has been hit by falling rainfall, leaving large dam projects fraught with risk.

At Turkana, the load factor – the ratio of average power to peak power – is 55%. “In Europe, load factors are between 26-28%,” says Carlo van Wageningen, chairman of Lake Turkana Wind Power (LTWP), who hopes the €600m project that was born on a fishing trip to the inhospitable region in the late 90s will reach financial close next year. “ One of our consortium members got the idea after having terrible problems pitching his tent. He came back and said: ‘We must do something about this wind.’”

Turkana is just one of a handful of groundbreaking green energy projects, including solar, geothermal and cogeneration, coming on stream in Africa. Many could offer a solution to the continent’s energy crisis and a quicker way to switch the lights on than rejuvenating the crumbling and strained traditional energy infrastructure. Only 13% of Kenyans have access to electricity, and Turkana’s wind, distributed via national utility the Kenya Power and Lighting Company, will power two million homes.

Another volcanic landscape, at Hell’s Gate in Olkaria in the Rift Valley, is the cradle of Kenya’s geothermal future. Wells sunk two miles down to hot, dry rockbeds are pumped with water, which evaporates into steam that is then piped to a generator and turned into electricity. Of an estimated 7,000-megawatt capacity, Kenya produces only 210MW, but now the government-owned Geothermal Development Company plans to drill 72 wells a year to push production to 1,200MW by 2015. More efficient wells in Olkaria and anticipated new sites in Menengai, near Nakuru, are among those expected to come on stream.

“Kenya is already suffering from the devastating effects of climate change,” says environmental expert Peerke de Bakker. “Electricity was rationed in August 2009 because hydro power capacity was cut in half due to drought. In principle, geothermal could supply sufficient power for decades to come.” De Bakker works at the Nairobi headquarters of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which is spearheading a drive to develop geothermal through other countries in the Rift Valley, where the earth’s crust is thin. These include Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda.

The ARGEO programme will start drilling in the Lake Assal area of Djibouti first, with ambitions for a 50MW geothermal power facility. “We are providing technical assistance and guiding surveys to find appropriate sites for first drilling,” says de Bakker. “It costs between $4m-$5m per hole. If you get nothing in return, it’s a big risk leading to big losses.”

Further north in the searing heat of the Sahara, Africa’s solar ambitions are taking shape. Morocco, which imports 95% of its electricity, has pledged to make solar generation account for 38% of its installed power generation by 2020. It recently kicked off tenders for its first 500MW power station, capable of powering 90,000 homes, outside the southern town of Ouarzazate. Slated for construction in 2012, it is being closely watched by developers at the Hamburg-based Desertec Industrial Initiative – a consortium formed in 2009 by bluechip German names including insurer Munich Re, E.ON and Siemens – which aims to supply 15% of Europe’s electricity from solar and wind-power projects in the Sahara by 2050.

Morocco is a key location for piloting the project because electricity can be fed through an existing submarine cable linking it to Spain, says Ernst Rauch, head of Munich Re’s Climate Change Centre. “Morocco has excellent infrastructure for transmission and power generation and we are hoping this can also be used for our pilots.”

But Africa’s clean energy projects aren’t just about feeding national – or European – electricity grids. Some are being used to clean up dirty industries and as a source of private power separate from national utility companies. At first glance the massive furnaces, pipes and ducts snaking around the outside of International Ferro Metals’ (IFM) Buffelsfontein plant, in South Africa’s mineral-rich north, simply confirm the stereotypical view of heavy industry, rearing up in the flat and scrub-covered landscape. There is no clue that the unsightly beige metalwork actually amounts to one of the most groundbreaking and innovative green power projects in the world.

It’s the culmination of three years’ work for former project financier Alex Berger, a leading green entrepreneur and founder and CEO of AAP Carbon, a Johannesburg-based company that builds and engineers Kyoto-compliant projects. “Smelting ore produces carbon monoxide-rich gas which businesses usually ignite, and expel as carbon dioxide straight into the atmosphere. Our technology harvests and cleans the waste gas for clean energy production,” he says.

His project will account for 12% of the London-listed IFM’s electricity needs and reduces its dependence on South Africa’s strained and carbon-intensive national power company Eskom, which generates 95% of its electricity from coal. In this instance, IFM wholly funded the ZAR300m (€32m) facility after a snappy one-week call to shareholders. After an anticipated start in December 2010, Berger says that going forward, AAP will own and operate all of its co-generation plants, which include the South African facilities of Indian ferrochrome producer Tata Steel.

Such new projects are a result of African governments starting to nurture their renewable sectors by giving investors long-term certainty. Along with subsidies and tax breaks for emission-reduction projects such as IFM’s, governments are also putting in place regulatory frameworks allowing for incentives such as feed-in- tariffs. Already widespread in Europe, and now in place in South Africa and Kenya, these require utilities to buy in renewable energy at premium prices, guaranteeing returns for developers.

“Renewable energy projects in Kenya had stalled without any tariff incentives,” explains South Africa-based Glenn Hodes, senior energy economist and programme manager at the UNEP Risoe Centre on Energy, Climate and Sustainable Development. “Without tariffs there is no incentive to switch from the cheapest sources like coal and diesel. “ The challenge for African governments is to set subsides that are generous enough to spur investment but do not make uneconomical projects viable.

Developers at Desertec in Germany are studying ways to fund this €400bn project, including European subsidies. Munich Re’s Rauch says: “At the moment European feed-in-tariffs are for domestically generated electricity only, yet the operators of African power plants supplying Europe will need a feed-in tariff so they are also guaranteed prices for the electricity they generate.” Desertec’s detractors believe the regulatory and legislative challenges of this, and doubts as to whether European consumers will cough up subsidies for African developers, cast long-term doubt on the project.

Similarly, Africa’s ability to pay for green energy lies at the heart of its energy debate. Foisting the cost of renewable energy on to consumers via feed-in tariffs or asking already deficit- laden governments like South Africa, with one of the world’s highest unemployment rates, to shoulder the cost through subsidies has raised questions about its ultimate benefit. This year South Africa has invested $125m (€94m) in renewable energy compared with Brazil’s $7.4bn (€5.5bn), according to the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“I don’t think the concept of renewable energy has been pushed on to Africa,” argues Cornelius van der Waal at consultancy Frost & Sullivan. “There is pressure from the developed world but in the long run it has to be beneficial. There is a big appetite for the green economy and its role in creating jobs.” In fact, South Africa seems to be trying to kill two birds with one stone with its recent pledge to reduce unemployment from 25% to 15% by creating 5 million jobs, many in low-carbon industries, over the next decade.

Carbon credits or certified emission reductions (CERs) are another revenue stream African projects are finally starting to tap. Under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), projects that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions can earn valuable credits which project developers can then sell to companies in the industrialised world. It ensures long-term additional revenue for projects in dollars or euros, but so far Africa has struggled to get in on the act.

In 2009 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change reported that around $84bn was invested in 684 emerging-market emission-reduction projects worldwide, yet African nations shared just 2% of that total. Hodes says: “A combination of perceived better investments to be found in other emerging markets like China and India, well-hyped regional risk such as corruption and political unrest, and overall investor uncertainty towards the continent has kept Africa lagging behind in the global carbon markets.”

But things are starting to change. Depending on its final close, Turkana could be the first wind project in sub-Saharan Africa to qualify for CDM. It will generate an estimated €7.5m, equivalent to 10% of its revenue stream, from carbon credits. AAP Carbon’s Berger says: “IFM will save 160,000 tonnes of CO2 a year and that could amount, at current carbon prices, to €2m annually for the duration of our 10-year crediting period. It’s an important revenue stream for us.” There are currently 140 sub-Saharan projects in the CDM pipeline that could create 85 million carbon credits, worth over $1.25bn by 2012. It’s a reversal of fortune the UNEP has worked hard to achieve. UNEP spokesperson Nick Nuttall says: “Our role is to alert governments and potential investors, and to assist with creative financing and the CDM mechanism and provide solutions to technical hurdles and bottlenecks. We are starting to see a remarkable change in the number of projects coming through. There is really strong growth in the pipeline.”

Other encouraging signs of change include news that from 2013 the world’s biggest consumer of carbon offsets, the EU, will admit carbon credits from new CDM projects in less developed countries only. The aim is to push carbon finance via the CDM away from dominant carbon-credit suppliers such as China and Brazil. It’s a timely fillip for African project developers concerned about low carbon prices and struggling to stay on top of the shifting regulatory terrain around CDM. Carbon prices have halved from highs of €25 in 2008, hitting projects trying to plan for the long term, says Adriaan Tas, director of Nairobi- based Carbon Africa, tasked with selling Lake Turkana’s carbon credits. “In principle there is a guaranteed market for carbon credits until 2020 but there is so much uncertainty around CDM and the carbon market itself as we approach 2012. We need a clear signal otherwise it will negatively influence prices and appetite even more.”

It could be that Africa is more suited to smaller, 20MW schemes rather than massive projects. Electricity demand is still low and smaller projects could feed more easily into countries’ undeveloped electricity grids. Turkana is lumbering towards a financial close but the number of players involved in the enormous project has stalled progress. Smaller projects could also be located closer to their consumers, cutting costs. Much of the project costs of Turkana, in deserted northern Kenya, and Desertec, on a different continent to its ultimate consumers, lie in transporting the electricity. “It doubles a project’s risk. Electricity is very difficult to transport and the transmission and interconnection aspects become as costly as the actual generation,” says Richard Metcalf, a specialist energy lawyer at Norton Rose in London. Other worries include the doubtful financial track records of some of Africa’s state-run utilities, responsible for paying power producers. Corruption from stakeholders seeking a slice of the carbon cake for themselves is another worry. “Everyone is talking about the carbon market and assuming its worth millions,” says Tas.

Challenges for sure, but surely it can’t be bad that African governments have finally woken up to the green energy potential that is hidden in their midst.