The longest nationwide power outage in Kenyans’ memory remains a mystery as the government-owned Kenya Power blamed a failure at Africa’s largest wind farm, which, in turn, laid the responsibility on the power grid.
Most Kenyans, including in the capital, Nairobi, saw power return almost 24 hours after the massive outage occurred on Friday night. Hundreds of people were stranded in darkness for hours at Kenya’s main international airport in Nairobi, leading to a public apology from the government. “This situation WILL NOT happen again,” Transport minister, Kipchumba Murkomen, said.
Shortly before midnight Saturday, Kenya Power offered the first detailed explanation of the outage, blaming it on a loss of power generation from the Lake Turkana Wind Power plant, Africa’s largest wind farm, causing an imbalance that “tripped all other main generation units and stations, leading to a total outage on the grid.”
But Lake Turkana Wind Power in a statement said it was not to blame. Instead, it said it had been forced to go offline by an “overvoltage situation in the national grid system which, to avoid extreme damage, causes the wind power plant to automatically switch off.” The plant produces nearly 15% of the national output.
Such an interruption should be immediately compensated by other power generators in the system, the company said, but the continuing outages in the national grid “preventing “prevented the wind plant from being brought back online.”
Kenya Power said it couldn’t even turn to importing power from neighboring Uganda, a relatively fast option that for some reason had been unavailable.
“We are jointly working on having the Uganda interconnector restored so as to enhance our grid recovery efforts,” it said.
President William Ruto, whose office told The Associated Press on Saturday it was still running on generator power hours after Kenya Power announced it had restored electricity to “critical areas” of the capital, did not comment publicly on the crisis.
Kenya gets almost all its electricity from renewable sources, a fact that the government will promote as it hosts the first Africa Climate Summit early next month, and the outage was an embarrassment a country that has sought to promote itself as a tech center on the continent but remains challenged by alleged mismanagement and poor infrastructure. (AP)
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