Powering Kenyan farms with electricity from tea clippings

CSS is helping safeguard the British cup of tea with a project that will use waste tea clippings to make greener power for Kenyan farmers.

Kenya produces £1 billion of tea a year, with up to a quarter of it destined for British tea bags.

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 70% funded by Innovate UK supported a feasibility study looking at the impact of MicroHub 500s at tea factories to create heat and power from waste tea clippings and to help decarbonise the sector.

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

Each 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.