The Lake Turkana Wind Power (LTWP) and Kenya Power (KPLC) power utilities traded online accusations on who was at fault for Friday's statewide outage.

While KPLC blamed the power source and stated that experts were dispatched to the wind farm to ascertain what caused the unexpected blackout, LTWP asserts that it was not producing power then.

PHOTO | COURTESY KPLC blames LTWP for the outage

LTWP, citing social media accounts and eventually looping in KPLC, claims that its system automatically shut down to avoid harm to an already overcharged national grid, absolving itself of responsibility.

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In their statement, they denied causing the outage, alleging that they had to go offline and stop generation following an overvoltage situation in the national grid system, which, to avoid extreme damage, caused the wind power plant to switch off automatically.

KPLC Managing Director and CEO Joseph Siror Energy and Petroleum Cabinet Secretary Davis Chirchir told the media on Saturday that LTWP caused the power outage.

PHOTO | COURTESY KPLC blames LTWP for the outage

In a following announcement, KPLC confirmed this, claiming that the nationwide power outage was caused by the loss of 270MW generation at the Lake Turkana Wind Power Plant (LTWP).

“The loss triggered an imbalance in the power system and tripped all other main generation units and stations, leading to a total outage on the grid.

Part of the Kenya Power statement reads, “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,”

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