The government has linked persistent power blackouts across the country to lack of investment in the transmission networks for a very long period of time.
- •Upgrading the network would take close to 20 months, requiring the government to work on quick fixes that would mitigate losses and delayed services from national power blackout like witnessed on Sunday night.
- •Giving an example of the Kisumu-Muhoroni-Chemosit power line, Energy CS Davis Chirchir noted that the line is constrained, in the case of Sunday incident, the line was carrying 120 Megawatts instead of recommended 80 megawatts.
- •“We know the problem, the challenge is how do we mitigate the short-term challenges so as to keep our country the way we would all like it to be,” said Chirchir.
On August 25, Kenya recorded the worst outage, causing a historical disruption on services. The cause remains a mystery, with the power company blaming a failure at Africa’s largest wind farm, which laid the responsibility on the power grid instead.
“We are going to work on quick fixes which will include putting a new transformer in areas such as Lesos, looking at how do we quickly have a solution between Muhoroni-Chemosit to deload that link and have a quick solution that goes from Muhoroni to Ndhiwa,” he said.
The CS said other interventions would entail working on how to build a line to support the Bomet area using concrete poles instead of the big towers in under three months. He said the government will have a comprehensive solution to the problem by 14th December, 2023.
- •Kenya on Sunday suffered its third worst power blackout plunging the whole country into darkness, it affected operations at crucial facilities such as airports creating panic among travelers.
- •Following the incident, Transport Cabinet Secretary led a team composed of PS Transport, Kenya Airports Authority Boad Chairman and Managing Director among other Kenya Airports Authority officials to assess the situation at the airport.
- •In parts of the country, including Nairobi, it took almost 24 hours for the power to come back on.
“Considering the frequency of the power disruption, and taking into account the fact that JKIA is a facility of strategic national importance, we are making formal request to the National Police Service to investigate possible acts of sabotage and coverup,” Murkomen said after changeover to the standby generators failed to restore power supply immediately at Terminals 1A and 1E.
Kenya Power launches new strategic plan (kenyanwallstreet.com)