Bitter stand-off over national power outage

Citizen Digital has established that engineers sent to inspect the 310MW power plant in Loyangalani were locked out the whole day while trying to extract information critical to determine how the power blackout happened.

Energy Cabinet Secretary Davis Chirchir had told journalists that a team of engineers had been dispatched to Loyangalani to investigate how the power plant suddenly went off the grid, suddenly withdrawing a 270MW supply and causing it to trip on Friday night.

“There was a sudden drop at the Lake Turkana Wind Power plant. Some of our engineers flew in to Lake Turkana to ascertain what caused the sudden drop before we pick from that source again,” Mr  Chirchis said at the National Control Center where engineers spent the better part of the day trying to restore supply.

A source intimated to Citizen Digital that officials of the wind power plant called the national control center to pick up the entire 270MW that was being generated at the time before mysteriously dropping off the system and causing the outage.

‘’We have a detailed log on events before the black out, now the other side (LTWP) Turkana have refused to give access to our guys to verify what happened,” the source intimated.

LTWP has a comfortable ‘take-or -pay ‘arrangement in its power supply deal with Kenya Power, meaning whether it is still locked out of the grid, consumers will still pay for the power it is generating.

A delay in constructing the transmission line to evacuate power after LTWP Ltd had completed building its power plant caused taxpayers Sh18.5 billion for power that was generated but not consumed.

The engineers at the National Control Center will also have a difficult time explaining why they chose to pick the entire 270MW from LTWP, not only a single source but also intermittent ( prone to sudden fluctuations).

“The merit order requires that we pick the cheapest source of power first and since LTWP’s deal is take or pay, we would still pay anyway even if we did not take it,” Energy PS Alex Wachira tried to explain on Saturday.

The Kenya Kwanza regime has already promised to reduce the cost of electricity, part of the reason that may have driven the engineers to prioritize wind power at the expense of grid stability.

The mistake turned out to be costly as the country ended up running on the expensive thermal sources for most of Friday night and Saturday as effort was being made to restore supply.

By late Saturday, more than half the 900MW that had been restored was thermal.