Twin interruptions on major power lines cause for blackout – Wandayi

 

Energy & Petroleum CS Opiyo Wandayi

A widespread electricity supply interruption was experienced today in Kenya lasting seven hours, the second of such incident within a week.

Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi attributes power outage to a trip of a high voltage transmission line evacuating 288 megawatts from the Turkana Wind Power Project to the Suswa Substation followed by interrupted supply on the Ethiopia–Kenya line.

For the second time in a week, most parts of Kenya save for North Rift and Western Kenya were plunged into darkness.

Wandayi says the nationwide outage was due to a partial collapse of the grid due to a trip of the high voltage transmission line at Suswa substation while evacuating 288MW from the Turkana wind power project.

This also resulted to a trip on the Ethiopia –Kenya 500Kv DC interconnector evacuating 200MW, resulting to a total loss of 488MW while the demand at the time was 1790MW.

However, parts of Western Kenya were not affected by the outage as they were supplied through the interconnector to Tororo, Uganda.

Today’s blackout comes a week after another country wide outage due to a malfunction of equipment at the Suswa power substation.

The outage comes a day after Wandayi said the issue was being addressed through various interventions.

In an update, Kenya Power said it restored electricity supply at 3:49PM, which was about seven hours of outage for affected areas.

The energy CS says the government is exploring lifting moratorium on power purchase agreements to enhance electricity generation as well as construction of alternative power evacuation lines to decongest the Suswa complex as a long term measure of addressing the outage.

By Benson Rioba