Kenya Power has blamed Wednesday night’s nationwide blackout on a technical disturbance in the national electricity grid, after large parts of the country were plunged into darkness for several hours.
The utility said power had been restored to all affected customers by 2am on Thursday, July 30, following efforts by its engineers to fix the fault.
In a statement issued on Thursday morning, Kenya Power said the outage had affected customers across several regions, with restoration carried out in phases as its teams worked to bring different parts of the network back online.
“We are pleased to report that power supply was fully restored to all affected customers by 2:00am today,” the company said.
The blackout became particularly widespread from around 9pm on Wednesday, affecting Nairobi, the Coast, Mt Kenya and large parts of the Rift Valley.
Several areas of the North Rift and Western Kenya, however, remained on supply even as other parts of the country experienced the outage. Counties including Turkana, West Pokot, Trans Nzoia, Uasin Gishu, Elgeyo Marakwet, Nandi and Baringo were among those that largely escaped the disruption.
Kenya Power began reporting progress on restoration late Wednesday night.
At around 10:11pm, the company said the Lanet, Naivasha and Juja Road substations had been energised, giving customers in parts of Nairobi and the Central Rift hope of having their electricity restored.
“Lanet, Naivasha and Juja Road substations have been energised, thus some customers in Central Rift and Nairobi are expected back on supply shortly,” Kenya Power said.
By 11:32pm, electricity had been restored in Mt Kenya, the North Rift, Western Kenya, South Nyanza and parts of Nairobi.
The Coast and some sections of Nairobi were among the last areas to regain supply. Areas affected along the Coast included Malindi, Kwale, Lamu, Kilifi and Taita Taveta.
The failure was yet another reminder of the importance of having a reliable electricity supply for homes, business and other critical facilities.
The interruption affected many small business owners who continued operating well after dark. Businesses dependent on electricity for lighting, cooling, communication and other transactions like money transfers were among the entities hit.
As a result of the power failure, homes and businesses within the affected areas had to spend some part of their nights without power while engineers fixed the power network.
Kenya’s national power grid connects various sources of electricity generation to the transmission network and distribution sub-stations through which the power gets distributed to final users.
Sources of electricity feeding into the national grid include geothermal electricity from the Olkaria facility, hydropower from the Seven Forks stations of the Tana River and wind energy generated from Lake Turkana Wind Power facility.
Some of the critical substations feeding electricity into the national grid include Suswa and Juja sub-stations.
There is no indication from Kenya Power regarding what exactly caused the technical problem, thus the customers are eagerly waiting for more information concerning the cause of the trouble and how to lower the chances of occurrence of similar faults.
The recovery that was achieved in the early hours of Thursday ended the long hours of interruption; however, the magnitude of the outage will bring to light the reliability of Kenya’s power grid network.