Kenya Power outages surge to 10.14 hours on ageing grid
Kenya has been plunged into at least eight countrywide blackouts since 2020, highlighting the deepening woes blamed on a host of factors notably ageing transmission lines.
It took Kenya Power an average of 10.14 hours to connect its millions of customers back to the national grid after a blackout in the year to June, new data by the sector regulator shows, underlining the shaky State of the utility’s ageing distribution system.
Data by the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (Epra) shows that power outages surged to an average of 10.14 hours a month in the year that ended June, up from 8.37 hours a year ago.
The duration of outages is measured on a System Average Interruption Duration Index (Saidi) and the rise has forced consumers to opt for backup and own power generation, notably solar and biomass in a bid to ease the impact of Kenya Power’s unreliability.
Kenya has been plunged into at least eight countrywide blackouts since 2020, highlighting the deepening woes blamed on a host of factors notably ageing transmission lines and allegations of sabotage.
“Overall, the reliability indices for the financial year 2023/2024 were lower compared to the previous year. This decline can be attributed partly to several national blackouts that occurred in August, November, and December 2023, as well as in March 2024,” Epra says.
Saidi is a measure of the total duration of interruptions a customer would experience in a given period and is measured in units of time (minutes, hours) per month or year.
The data shows that the longest outage was in April this year with an average of 17.29 hours followed by 13.9 hours the following month.
Epra had capped the maximum duration of power outages in the year that ended June at five hours, meaning it breached this limit by more than double.
An ageing transmission line which is in dire need of upgrade has been blamed for the outages, especially when overloading occurs forcing the lines to trip. Businesses are forced to turn to back-ups such as generators, while those without temporarily close shop, plunging them into losses.
Hospitals bear an even bigger brunt of the outages, especially for patients on life-saving machines or those in critical care.
There have also been allegations of sabotage with the most recent being the countrywide blackout that hit Kenya in January this year, where several senior staff at Kenya Power were arrested on allegations of vandalising high-voltage lines at Embakasi.
In August last year, Kenya Power and Lake Turkana Wind Power traded accusations over the nationwide blackout that hit Kenya that month. The outage lasted more than 20 hours making it one of the longest in the country’s history.
The frequency of power outages also increased in the year that ended in June, exerting more pressure on Kenya Power to upgrade the system.
The average number of blackouts-- which is measured in the System Average Interruption Frequency Index (Saifi)-- rose to 3.96 from 3.75 in the year that ended June 2023. Saifi is the average number of times that a system customer experiences an outage during the year (or period under study).
This was higher than the cap set by Epra of 2.15 interruptions per customer in the year that ended in June.
Increased unreliability of the Kenya Power supplies come despite the utility firm successfully pushing for a higher retail tariff in order to raise more cash to fund the upgrade of the system.
Epra gazetted higher electricity retail tariffs effective April 1, last year, offering Kenya Power the chance to get at least ten percent of the additional billions to help revamp the transmission network.
