Cabinet Takes Action After Nationwide Blackout
The directive was captured in a Cabinet despatch shared by State House Spokesperson, Hussein Mohamed on Tuesday, August 29 after President William Ruto chaired a Cabinet meeting at the Kakamega State Lodge.
Marvin Chege 
The Cabinet has directed the review of the power distribution system in Kenya to avoid a repeat of the nationwide blackout witnessed across the country for more than 12 hours.
The directive was captured in a Cabinet despatch shared by State House Spokesperson, Hussein Mohamed on Tuesday, August 29 after President William Ruto chaired a Cabinet meeting at the Kakamega State Lodge.
The Cabinet during the meeting expressed regret regarding the blackout which was caused by a total failure of the electrical grid and made decisive steps to avert a similar incident from occurring in the future.
Screengrab of a power blackout that affected Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on August 25, 2023. /TWITTER
"Cabinet regretted the total electrical grid outage that led to a nationwide blackout on Saturday last week. Cabinet consequently directed the review of the power distribution system in the country, to ensure that the unfortunate occurrence shall not recur," read the dispatch in part.
Following the blackout, a blame game ensued between Kenya Power and Lake Turkana Wind Power, with the latter denying the former's claims that they caused the power outage.
LTWP had stated that they were forced to go offline and stop generation following an overvoltage in the national grid which caused the power plant to go off automatically to avoid extreme damage.
On Monday, August 28, Energy Cabinet Secretary (CS) Davis Chirchir stated that the Ministry was yet to restore LTWP to the national grid, adding that they were trying to find the cause of the problem.
"When there is so much demand, you lose so much. The system was basically securing itself by switching off and sometimes it is better for the system to switch itself off than to burn down," he stated.
"As we speak today we have not returned the Lake Turkana Wind Power plant to the grid, we are trying to analyse if there was a problem before we bring them back on."
Kenya Power in their previous statement stated that after losing 270MW generation from LTWP, an imbalance in the power system was triggered and tripped all other main generation units and stations, leading to a total outage on the grid.
"While there are situations where a plant could trip, our technical teams are analyzing the data from the protection relays to establish the root cause of the trip which caused a cascade failure of the system.
"The System Demand at the time was 1855.8 MW and therefore, a loss of approximately 15% of generation was expected to cause a widespread power outage," stated the monopoly firm.
According to Kenya Power, mobilization for the restoration of power supply commenced immediately after the lines carrying the affected generation were isolated.
Electricity from Seven Fork Hydro power stations was utilized to kick start the restoration exercise, an option that the firm argued took much longer compared to electricity import from Uganda (UETCL), which is faster but was unavailable at the time.
"Most of the grid was sequentially restored from Central and Eastern Regions where the hydro generation is located and towards Nairobi. By 1145 hrs today most of the transmission grid had been energized and normal power supply to customers was restored as generation came on board.
"We are jointly working on having the Uganda interconnector restored so as to enhance our grid recovery efforts. Additionally, we are in the final stages of onboarding power from the Olkaria complex where most of the geothermal plants are located to allow the restoration of power supply to parts of Nairobi, Coast, Western, Central Rift, North Rift and South Nyanza that are still off supply," the power supplier added.
