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Friday, September 6, 2024 –The Energy Cabinet Secretary CS Opiyo Wandayi has visited the National Power Control Centre after another National Power Blackout to check on the critical issues affecting the dispatching of power across the country.
In a statement after the inspection conducted on Friday September 6, Wandayi revealed the cause of the nationwide blackout that has now struck twice since he took office.
He said, the outage was triggered by a failure in the 220kV Loiyangalani transmission line, which was evacuating 288MW from the Lake Turkana Wind Power (LTWP) plant.
“The tripping of the Suswa line was followed by the failure of the Ethiopia-Kenya 500kV interconnector, which was carrying 200MW at the time,” stated Wandayi. This double blow led to the loss of 488MW, a staggering 27.3 per cent of Kenya’s total electricity generation at the time, throwing much of the country into darkness.
Western Kenya, for today, was spared due to power being supplied through the interconnector to Uganda, but the rest of the nation faced the long-hours hitch.
“The system demand was at 1790MW, and losing almost 30 per cent of the generation led to a cascade failure and partial grid collapse,” Wandayi explained.
Hours later, Kenya Power management said the electricity had been restored to affected parts of the North Rift, Central Rift, Western, Nairobi, and Mount Kenya areas.
“We would like to apologise to our customers for the inconvenience caused by the outage and seek their patience as we work towards restoration of normal service in the remaining areas,” it asserted in a statement.
This was the second major blackout in under a week, raising concerns about the country’s energy infrastructure preparedness.
CS Wandayi pointed to years of under-investment in critical power systems. “What we are witnessing is the result of suboptimal investment in energy infrastructure,” he confessed.
