Cause of Kenya’s longest-recorded power outage remains unclear as grid providers trade blame

Nairobi, Kenya — The longest national blackout that Kenyans can remember remained a mystery on Sunday, when the state power company blamed a failure at Africa’s largest wind farm, placing the blame on the power grid.

Some of Kenya’s more than 50 million people, including the capital Nairobi, saw power return nearly 24 hours after a massive blackout on Friday night. It was an embarrassment for the East African economic hub that has tried to promote itself as a technology hub on the continent but remains challenged by alleged mismanagement and poor infrastructure.

Hundreds of people were stranded in the dark for hours at Kenya’s main international airport in Nairobi, prompting a rare public apology from a government minister in a country where tourism is a key part of the economy. “This situation will NOT happen again,” said Transport Minister Kipchumba Murkomen.

The head of the Kenya Airports Authority has been sacked after a generator serving the main international terminal failed to start.

Shortly before midnight Saturday, Kenya Power offered the first detailed explanation for the outage, attributing it to a loss of power generation from the Lake Turkana wind farm, the largest wind farm in Africa, causing an imbalance that “triggered to all other main generating units and stations”. , which caused a total network outage.”

But Lake Turkana Wind Power denied in a statement that it was at fault. Instead, it said it had been forced to go offline by an “overvoltage situation on the national grid system which, to prevent extreme damage, causes the wind power plant to shut down automatically.” The plant produced almost 15% of the national production at that time.

Such an outage should be immediately compensated by other power generators in the system, the company said, but continued outages in the national grid prevented the wind farm from being brought back into operation.

Kenya Power said it could not even import power from neighboring Uganda, a relatively quick option that for some reason had not been available.

“We are working together to restore the Uganda interconnector to enhance our network recovery efforts,” he said.

President William Ruto, whose own office told The Associated Press on Saturday that it was still running on generators hours after Kenya Power announced it had restored power to “critical areas” of the capital, did not comment publicly on the crisis. Instead, he again criticized the opposition’s calls for anti-government protests over the rising cost of living, calling them a threat to investors.

“Shame on Nation” was the main headline in one of Kenya’s leading newspapers, the Sunday Nation. He said the blackout was costing businesses millions of dollars and leaving some major hospitals running on generators.

Kenya gets almost all its electricity from renewable sources, a fact the government will promote when it hosts the first African Climate Summit early next month.