This archive report was first published on 9 May 2020.
On Saturday morning, Kenyans woke up to a nationwide power outage, with most parts of the country plunged into darkness. The outage, which lasted for several hours, left many frustrated and took to social media to express their fury at Kenya Power.
However, in a statement released by the power distributor, Kenya Power has assured Kenyans that their engineers have identified the technical fault behind the outage and are working to restore power. The restoration of power is underway, with parts of Nairobi Central Business District and environs, hosting critical facilities, already back on supply.
According to Kenya Power, the reported technical fault occurred at a section of the high-voltage transmission power line that evacuates power to Nairobi from Olkaria Power Generation sites in Naivasha. The fault, which occurred near Kiambu town, led to power loss on the critical power line, thus overloading other power generators countrywide and causing the outage.
Investigations are still ongoing to conclusively establish the cause of the nationwide power outage. In the meantime, Kenya Power has apologized to Kenyans for the inconvenience caused and assured them that their engineers are working hard to ensure normal power supply resumes.
"We have lost power supply in the national grid due to a system disturbance which occurred on our transmission network at 5:49 am this morning," Kenya Power stated. "Our engineers are working to identify and address the hitch, towards restoring normal electricity supply," the statement added.
