Why Kenya Power took much longer to restore power after outage as it reaches out to Uganda
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Kenya Power reaches out to Uganda for help as nationwide outage escalates, taking more than 15 hours
Kenya Power reaches out to Uganda for help as nationwide outage escalates, taking more than 15 hours.
Kenya Power has announced it is working on having Uganda’s interconnector restored to enhance power recovery efforts around the country.
The utility company explained in a statement that while they were waiting on Uganda, they had to start the restoration process with electricity from the Seven Fork Hydro power plants.
On Saturday, August 26, Kenya Power announced that its engineers had looked into alternative power sources and had contacted Uganda for assistance after losing 270MW of generation from the Lake Turkana Wind Power Plant (LTWP).
However, Uganda failed to offer help to Kenya in the hour of need, hence forcing Kenya Power to turn to Seven Fork Hydro power stations in Thika, which was immediately utilised to kick start the restoration exercise.
According to Kenya Power, the process of integrating Seven Fork Hydropower was far more time-consuming than importing electricity from Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Limited (UETCL).
Kenya Power also revealed that the importation of electricity from Uganda would have been more efficient and convenient but was unavailable at the moment of crisis.
Nonetheless, it still reached out to Uganda to aid in ending the over 20-hour power outage.
“We are jointly working on having the Uganda interconnector restored so as to enhance our grid recovery efforts,” Kenya Power revealed.
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What caused the national power blackout that plunged country into darkness
In the contingency plan that was put in place by the managers, Kenya Power quickly designed a framework that would stabilise the imbalance in the power system that also tripped all other main generation units and stations, leading to a total outage on the grid.
“While there are situations where a plant could trip, our technical teams are analyzing the data from the protection relays to establish the root cause of the trip, which caused a cascade failure of the system.
“The System Demand at the time was 1855.8 MW, and therefore, a loss of approximately 15 per cent of generation was expected to cause a widespread power outage,” Kenya Power explained the cause of the outage.
It said it is also working on electricity restoration in parts of Nairobi, Coast, Western, Central Rift, North Rift and South Nyanza that are still off supply.
“We are in the final stages of onboarding power from the Olkaria complex where most of the geothermal plants are located,” part of the statement read.
On Friday night, the country was plunged into darkness following a massive power outage that affected most parts of the country.
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