Kenya Power added 19,029 corporate customers to the grid in the financial year ended June 2024, cutting the number of projects whose owners had paid millions of shillings in fees, but the connection was delayed for years by 89.6 percent.
The latest disclosures by the utility firm show that the number of projects with delayed connections dropped from the 21,231 that had been flagged by the auditor-general in the financial year ended June 2023. The audit had shown that two of the projects had waited for 11 years.
Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu had put Kenya Power on the spot for delaying connections of the projects to the grid despite having received Sh12.08 billion as connection fees from the owners of the said projects.
Now Kenya Power has moved to address the delay, which was in breach of its customer charter that requires that connections be done between seven and 28 days of receiving payments.
“During the year under review there has been enhanced customer connectivity and schemes over three years reduced from 21,231 as reported in last year's audit findings to the reported 2,202 schemes in the year under audit,” said Kenya Power in the latest annual report.
Kenya Power had attributed the delayed connections to challenges in wayleaves acquisition, leading to the redesign of some projects and sometimes abandonment of the same.
The utility firm had also cited the non-availability of some critical materials needed for construction such as cables, conductors, meters, and transformers, and suspension of the construction contracts with hired labor and transport contractors as well as court cases.
Delayed connection of customers to the grid denies Kenya Power revenue while also denying the affected customers a chance to derive value from the electricity, including home use and business operations.
In the year ended June 2024, the company connected 447,251 new customers to the grid against the targeted 400,000 customers, surpassing the connectivity target for the year by 12 percent. The new connections took the total connections to 9.66 million, putting Kenya Power on course to hit the 10 million mark this financial year.
According to Kenya Power, the accelerated connectivity was supported by the availability of critical materials during the period and the subsequent deployment of a rapid results initiative (RRI) in October last year.
The RRI enabled the company to fast-track meter installation for pending and new connections across the country.
“We will sustain this connectivity drive towards attaining universal access to electricity, with an additional four million customers targeted to be connected by the year 2030,” said the utility firm.
However, the aging grid has seen the utility firm struggle to improve on reliability of the electricity even as the peak demand increases. Kenya’s peak demand has been growing in the last five consecutive years, hitting 2,177 MW in the year ended June 2024 from 2,149 MW a year earlier. The peak demand stood at 1,926MW five years ago.
Kenya Power's annual electricity sales crossed 10,000 gigawatt hours (GWh) in 2023 and closed the year ended June 2024 at 10,516 GWh. The power distributor projects that in the next four years, electricity demand will grow to 2,815MW.
