Kenya's Power Grid Collapses Again: Second Major Outage in a Week

Kenya experienced its second major blackout in a week on Friday, though power had been restored to 70% of affected customers by late afternoon, according to the national distributor, Kenya Power, and Energy Minister Opiyo Wandayi. The outage occurred when a transmission line tripped at a substation, followed by a second failure on the Ethiopia-Kenya high-voltage transmission line, Wandayi explained in a statement.

"The loss of 488MW, representing 27.3% of total power generation, led to a cascading failure and a partial grid collapse," Wandayi said. He attributed the situation to long-standing issues, noting, "What we are witnessing today has built up over time due to inadequate investment in infrastructure."

This latest blackout, which disrupted several regions in East Africa's largest economy, came on the heels of another extended outage on August 30. Kenya has experienced a series of power failures over the past year, including one that left Nairobi's main airport in darkness.

As the loss has been increased and had led to power outage, it’s a crucial time to increase focus on energy efficiency as a way to save electricity. One particular example is FORCE device is a power saving device by ENPOSS. FORCE is intended at optimizing electric utilization with an aim of reducing overall electricity usage.