The government wants buildings including those owned by the state to incorporate electric car charging stations in the next five years.
According to the Standard, the Ministry of Energy could require real estate developers to incorporate electric car charging stations between 2020 and 2025. This is because as the new technology starts to pick up, they would want the faster adoption of less polluting vehicles.
In a strategy to boost their uptake between now and 2025, they have plans to increase the number of electric vehicle imports to 5% of total imports. This would mean increasing the number of imported electric cars to about 16,000 per year.
This will involve incentives to lower import duty for electric cars, bicycles and tuk-tuks as well as lower vehicle road taxes. It will also involve revision of the building code to incorporate charging stations in public buildings and new estate. The government through the National Treasury reduced the excise duty of fully electric cars to 10% down from 20%.
The Ministry is also in talks with other energy players on putting up charging stations. ““We are already talking to Kenya Power to see if we can facilitate the establishment of charging stations and what that is going to look like,” Issac Kiva, Secretary for Renewable Energ said.
This news comes after KenGen announced last month that they were planning to roll out electric car charging infrastructure. The fact that the government is serious about this means that the next decade, we should see more of these cars in the country, which is great news.
