On Friday, August 25, 2023, around 21:45, there was a national power outage.
The loss of 270MW of electricity from the Lake Turkana Wind Power Plant (LTWP) was the cause of the blackout.
The loss caused the grid to go completely offline by causing an imbalance in the power system and tripping all other primary generation units and stations.
“While there are situations where a plant could trip, our technical teams are analysing the data from the protection relays to establish the root cause of the trip which caused a cascade failure of the system,” said CS Chirchir.
A loss of roughly 15% of generation was predicted to result in a significant power outage because the system demand at the time of the blackout was 1855.8 MW.
Technical teams drawn from Kenya Power and the Kenya Electricity Transmission (KETRACO) are currently reviewing the incidence reports with the view of forestalling such an occurrence in the future.
The CS promised that the full findings of the report will be shared with the public in due course.
