The Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (EPRA) has removed the 15,000-unit monthly limit on the e-mobility tariff, the cheaper electricity rate Kenya Power charges for charging electric vehicles. The change is in Gazette Notice 15188, published on 18th September 2026, and it’s backdated to 1st July 2025.
A unit is one kilowatt-hour (kWh), the same unit on your token receipt. The rates haven’t changed. Customers on the e-mobility tariff, which the tariff schedule calls Method EM, pay KES 16 a unit, and KES 8 a unit for power used off-peak. Off-peak is 10pm to 6am on weekdays, midnight to 8am and 2pm to midnight on Saturdays and public holidays, and the whole of Sunday. A small business using more than 100 units a month pays KES 19 a unit. A home in the same band pays KES 18.57.
Those are energy charges only. Every bill adds pass-through charges on top, including fuel cost, exchange rate and inflation adjustments, levies and VAT, so the final price of a unit is higher. We explained how those charges work when the government shelved Kenya Power’s tariff review in June.
What the cap was
EPRA created the EM category in the Schedule of Tariffs 2023, gazetted on 24th March 2023 and in force from 1st April 2023. It covered e-mobility customers supplied at 240 or 415 volts whose consumption did not exceed 15,000 units in a billing period. Go past that, and a customer no longer fit the EM definition.
For one home charger, 15,000 units is a lot. For a bus depot, it isn’t. BasiGo’s E9 Kubwa bus has a 210 kWh battery. Charge 10 of them fully every night and a depot uses about 2,100 units a night, so it hits the cap in about a week.
That’s where the bigger operators had got to. Most of BasiGo’s 17 charging stations in Kenya were going over the cap, and so were more than 20 of Spiro’s 500 battery-swap stations. Spiro swaps flat batteries for charged ones on electric motorbikes. Some station owners charged drivers up to KES 5 extra a unit once they passed the limit.
So if you run a bus depot or a busy swap station, you now stay on the EM tariff for the whole month, whatever you use.
Demand outgrew the rule
Kenya Power sold 13,500 units to e-mobility customers in July 2023. By April 2026 it was selling about 1.5 million units a month, and it had 331 customers on the EM tariff. In June, we covered Kenya Power’s push to move home and office EV chargers onto the tariff.
Kenya Power applied for a new three-year tariff in March 2026, to start in July. The Ministry of Energy withdrew that application on 3rd June, so the 2023 schedule is still in force. EPRA has amended it instead of replacing it.
Moses Nderitu is BasiGo’s managing director in Kenya and vice-president of the Electric Mobility Association of Kenya. He says the extra headroom lets BasiGo open its charging sites to motorbikes, vans and private EVs, beyond its own buses.
The catch on the night rate
The same notice adds EM customers to Note 3 of the schedule. Note 3 says these customers must first “meet their monthly Energy Consumption Threshold”, and only the units above it get the discounted off-peak rate. Until now, Note 3 covered small commercial and industrial customers only.
The threshold is the customer’s own average monthly use over the last six months, plus 6%. For a new customer, it’s the average of its first three months.
Read as written, Note 3 changes the maths. Say a swap station has averaged 12,000 units a month for six months, so its threshold is 12,720 units. Next month it uses 14,000 units, all at night. At KES 8 a unit, that’s KES 112,000. Under Note 3, the first 12,720 units are billed at KES 16, which is KES 203,520, and only the 1,280 units above the threshold get KES 8, another KES 10,240. The bill comes to KES 213,760 before pass-through charges and VAT, almost double.
The EM method itself still lists KES 8 for every off-peak unit. The notice doesn’t say how the two lines fit together, and it doesn’t say whether Kenya Power will rebill the 14 months since 1st July 2025. EM customers running at full capacity day and night can also get a 5% discount on the off-peak rate once Kenya Power confirms it.
Other changes in the same notice
- A customer exporting solar power to the grid under an approved net-metering agreement, with up to 1 MW installed, gets credit for 50% of the power it exports. Pass-through charges, levies and taxes are worked out on everything Kenya Power supplied, before that credit.
- Power pushed into the grid without Kenya Power’s approval or a net-metering agreement is charged at the base tariff. EPRA calls this dumping.
- Homes are billed in three bands: DC1 is up to 30 units a month, DC2 is 30 to 100, and DC3 is 100 to 15,000. Your band is set by your three-month moving average, as we explained in July 2025.
The cap is gone, backdated to July 2025. What that saves a depot depends on how Kenya Power applies Note 3 to the night rate, and the first bills under the amended schedule will show it.
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