Kenyan tea farms are being powered by electricity from waste tea clippings.

Kenya produces £1bn of tea a year, with up to a quarter of it destined for the UK, but the industry is threatened by an unreliable and expensive electricity grid that cuts out for an hour a day on average, causing producers to rely on diesel generators for power and wood for heat.

A project, part funded by Innovate UK, has trialled ‘MicroHubs’ (small, modular, waste management and decentralised energy systems that generate power, heat and hydrogen) at tea factories, creating heat and power from waste tea clippings and decarbonising the sector.

Each Microhub 500 unit can produce 600kWh of heat and 500kWh of power and handle 3,750 tonnes of biomass and solid recovered fuel (SRF) per annum, while about 41 per cent of carbon is captured in the biochar.

As an added bonus, the biochar produced can be used to rejuvenate the soil and increase tea yields by up to 23 per cent.

500kWh plant will create jobs for up to ten skilled technical and operational workers with an extra ten workers in fabrication and support. Some 300 jobs could be created in Kenya within five years of deployment.

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