Major Power Outage Cripples Nairobi

The failure of a key transmission line caused an almost nationwide blackout yesterday. The blackout that lasted five hours happened when the high voltage line at a substation in Juja Road tripped, triggering a series of failures in the national grid. What was alarming about Tuesday’s outage was that it was much more widespread than usual. Kenya Power and Lighting Company made a public statement yesterday confirming that the major power blackout affected “many electricity customers in Nairobi, Mount Kenya and Coast regions,” adding that only the western part of the country and the Rift Valley were spared.

For most Kenyan households who would consider having a generator an extreme luxury, the evening begun in the dark or lit by candlelight. KPLC itself is running the country’s electricity on generators. ‘‘It is true we are running our generators right now. When we do that for longer periods of time it is very expensive because there is no concession on the fuel taxes for diesel consumed in such machines,’’ communicated Diana, a source at KPLC. It currently supplies 1,250 megawatts to over 2 million customers, against a demand of 1,700 megawatts.

For Charles Karachi, 35, the situation raises the levels of insecurity. ‘‘Thieves might use the situation to break into houses and other commercial premises and I can only hope our police is gearing up to put boots on the ground to patrol critical neighbourhoods and not let us get insult on top of injury.’’ Eunice Mukami, 45, sees the power loss as a great cost to our fragile economy. “It slows down the growth and in turn affects the Kenya curency and stock exchange.” Daniel Mutheka, 25, on the other hand, says that KPLC power outages are a regular protocol which the need to improve as there is poor maintenance of their service.

By Michael Nzambu