Kenya Power says an electricity conductor that came off support insulators and fell on a tower has led to the nationwide loss of power supply.
“The fault, which occurred near Kiambu Town, led to power loss on the critical power line, thus overloading other power generators countrywide,” says Kenya Power Network Manager, Engineer Charles Mwaura, in a mid-morning press statement.
“Restoration of power supply is in progress with parts of Nairobi central business district and its environs, which host critical facilities, back on supply.”
Kenya Power announced Saturday morning (May 9) that the entire country was plunged into darkness at 5:49am following “a system disturbance which occurred on our transmission network”.
“Our engineers are working to identify and address the hitch (sic), towards restoring normal electricity supply,” said Kenya Power in a press release early Saturday.
“We wish to apologise to our customers for the inconvenient caused.”
In what appears to be a strange coincidence, neighbouring country Uganda’s national electricity supplier, Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Limited (UETCL), announced a nationwide outage on Saturday.
“The UETCL team is working to have power supply restored,” said the firm in a press release.
In a separate press statement, the Ugandan power supplier said on Friday, May 8, that parts of the country will experience interruption of electricity supply on Saturday, Sunday and Monday from 9am to 5pm.
UETCL said the outage will be due to “emergency load shedding to allow the generation plants at Nalubale, Kiira, Bujagali and isumba undergo critical water release tests”.
However, on Saturday, May 9, one of their mentioned dates, the entire country was thrown into darkness despite UETCL assuring users that only certain parts of Uganda will be affected.
