Kenya Power board chairperson Joy Mdivo-Masinde on Saturday painted a picture of what exactly caused the nationwide blackout on Friday evening.
Mdivo however said that even though most parts of the country will be reconnected to power supply before the end of the day, she warned that Kenyans should expect interruptions through the weekend as the situation is stabilised.
“The engineers have worked all night long, and have managed to get our Turkwel power station to put more into our grid,” she said.
“Power will be back, at some point today, but brace yourself for intermittent supply until our engineers, God helping them, get the situation completely resolved,” she added.
Going further, Mdivo said the outage was due to loss of power at the Turkana power station affecting the supply.
She said the grid is designed in such a way that when a maximum of 4 percent of the power needs is lost, other parts of the grid that are powered pick up the slack.
However, with the Friday situation, the loss exceeded the 4 percent loss, making the grid unable to handle it.
"Turkana being down, means a lot of power suddenly is not available to the grid, so the limited power that is there has been prioritized and only some substations powered back up," she explained.
She noted that should such an incident occur, the available safe option is to shut down the other substations, as a protective measure.
This, she said, is what happened on Friday, adding the process of restoring power in this scenario takes a maximum of two hours.
"A trip means we just need to sequentially power the grid back up, by switching on one substation after another until we are done."
