Olkaria's industrial park becomes a customs zone, and its tax reliefs switch on.

For a generator or an industrial offtaker weighing a site beside Kenya's geothermal fields, the duty treatment of imported plant at Olkaria is now settled rather than pending. The Commissioner of Customs and Border Control has declared the KenGen Green Energy Park a customs controlled area in Kenya Gazette Notice No. 8412 of 5 June 2026, issued in favour of KenGen Energy Services (SEZ) Limited under the "East African Community Customs Management Act, 2004".

That declaration completes the park's standing as a special economic zone, which is the status that lets tenants claim the customs and tax reliefs set out in the "Special Economic Zones Act, 2015". The site is now treated in law as its own customs jurisdiction, with defined procedures, monitored gates and bonded handling applying to anything that crosses its boundary in either direction. In plain terms, the fence line does the work of a border, and those arrangements are enforceable rather than promised.

Five investors have already been signed to the site, spread across computing, fertiliser, transport electrification, metal fabrication and freight handling, each attracted by firm low carbon baseload supply rather than intermittent output. The company operates 1,786 MW of installed capacity, of which 754 MW is geothermal, 826 MW hydro and 25.5 MW wind.

Read together, the notice and the zone framework move KenGen a step away from selling megawatt hours into the national grid and towards hosting load next to the steam field, where a generation licence is no longer the only route to revenue from Olkaria.

Duty and tax relief bite only as qualifying inputs actually arrive at the gate. The implication is that the designation's worth to any single tenant follows that tenant's own financial close, construction start and the date its plant reaches commercial operation, rather than the date printed on the notice.