Although 70% of consumers had their electricity restored by late afternoon, Kenya experienced its second significant blackout in as many weeks on Friday, according to the country’s energy minister and national distributor, Kenya Power.
According to a statement from Energy Minister, Opiyo Wandayi, the power outage was caused by a transmission line tripping at a substation, which was followed by another trip on the high-voltage transmission line between Ethiopia and Kenya.
“The loss of 488MW, accounting for 27.3% of the total generation, resulted in cascade failure and a partial collapse of the grid,” Wandayi said.
“What we are witnessing today has built up over time and is a result of sub-optimal investment in infrastructure.”
The blackout, which lasted for many hours on August 30 and affected multiple districts of the largest economy in East Africa, came after another one.
The Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC) said that the outage affected all regions except North Rift and Western. Although Kenya Power hasn’t stated the cause of the incident, it has however corporation apologised and promised to fix it.
Over the past year, Kenya has had several blackouts, one of which completely darkened Nairobi’s main airport.
