On Friday, August 25, 2023, around 21:45, Kenyans experienced the longest national power outage. The power returned later after almost 24 hours, therefore leading to so many questions being asked after hundreds of people were stranded in darkness for hours at Kenya’s main international airport in Nairobi.
However, on Monday, August 28, 2023, Cabinet Secretary for Energy David Chirchir, clarified that the cause of blackout was due to the loss of 270MW of electricity from the Lake Turkana Wind Power Plant (LTWP).
”The loss caused the grid to go completely offline by causing an imbalance in the power system and tripping all other primary generation units and stations,” said CS Chirchir.
“While there are situations where a plant could trip, our technical teams are analysing the data from the protection relays to establish the root cause of the trip which caused a cascade failure of the system,” he added.
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Moreover, the CS also revealed that teams from various sectors, including SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), Telcos and Kenya Power, are examining closely the logs to determine the exact sequence of events that led to the blackout.
However, despite of the clarification being given by the CS that the loss of power from the Lake Turkana Wind Power caused the blackout, the wind farm has disputed this claim. In a statement issued on Sunday, the wind farm emphasized that it was not responsible for the power outage.
The Wind Farm’s statement elucidates: “LTWP was forced to go offline and stop generation following an over-voltage situation in the national grid system which, to avoid extreme damage, caused the wind power plant to automatically switch off.”
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