Joy Mdivo-Masinde, the Chairperson of the Kenya Power board, provided insight into the factors behind the nationwide blackout that occurred on Friday evening. Mdivo-Masinde clarified that while power would be restored to most regions by the end of the day, she cautioned that interruptions should be anticipated throughout the weekend as efforts continue to stabilize the situation.
“The engineers have worked all night long, and have managed to get our Turkwel power station to put more into our grid,” she said.
“Power will be back, at some point today, but brace yourself for intermittent supply until our engineers, God helping them, get the situation completely resolved,” she added.
Mdivo went on to say that the supply was affected by the Turkana power station losing power, which caused the outage.
According to her, the grid is set up so that when up to 4% of the required power is missing, other powered portions of the grid pick up the slack.
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The grid was unable to handle the Friday situation since the loss was greater than the 4 percent loss.
"Turkana being down, means a lot of power suddenly is not available to the grid, so the limited power that is there has been prioritized and only some substations powered back up," she explained.
She pointed out that in the event of such an incident, the recommended safety measure is to initiate a shutdown of other substations as a protective measure. She explained that this was the course of action taken on Friday, further noting that the power restoration process in such cases typically takes a maximum of two hours.
"A trip means we just need to sequentially power the grid back up, by switching on one substation after another until we are done."
