Lake Turkana has distanced itself from the statement made by Kenya Power, which claimed that the power outage was caused by a loss of 270MW generation from the Lake Turkana Wind Power Plant.
Lake Turkana note that their attention is drawn to various social media reports and a statement by Kenya Power in respect of the present power outage which, since Friday 25 August 2023 from 2145hrs, has affected many parts of the country.
“Lake Turkana Wind Power (LTWP) wishes to assert that it has not caused the current power outage LTWP was forced to go offline and stop generation following an overvoltage situation in the national grid system which, to avoid extreme damage, causes the wind power plant to automatically switch off.
“The conclusion that the grid system overvoltage caused this issue is supported by preliminary reports and analysis undertaken by the relevant independent industry stakeholders.
“At the time LTWP was forced to switch off, it was producing 270MW out of a national total of I855MW (14.65).” Said Lake Turkana in a statement.
According to Lake Turkana, the large drop in generation output, following the grid system instability, resulted in a situation where national power supply was interrupted.
“Typically, this interruption would be immediately compensated for by other power generators in the system.
“Since LTWP was forced to switch off on Friday evening, the plant has not yet been brought back into operation.
“During this period there have been further interruptions and outages in the national grid system which also remain beyond the scope of LTWP and, in fact, prevent us from bringing the plant back online until these have been resolved.
“LTWP is, and always has been, fully and unconditionally, committed to working with all
industry stakeholders to ensure the supply of low cost renewable energy.
“At present, we are doing whatever we can to support the immediate restoration of power to every consumer in the country.”
Earlier Statement from KPLC:
“Nairobi, 26th August 2023…Last night, at 2145hrs, the country experienced a nationwide power outage after losing 270MW generation from Lake Turkana Wind Power Plant (LTWP).
“The loss triggered an imbalance in the power system and tripped all other main generation units and stations, leading to a total outage on the grid.
“While there are situations where a plant could trip, our technical teams are analyzing the data from the protection relays to establish the root cause of the trip which caused a cascade failure of the system.
“The System Demand at the time was 1855.8 MW and therefore, a loss of approximately 15% of generation was expected to cause a widespread power outage.
“Mobilization for restoration of power supply commenced immediately after the lines carrying the affected generation were isolated.
“Electricity from Seven Fork Hydro power stations was utilized to kick start the restoration exercise, an option that takes much longer compared to electricity import from Uganda (UETCL), which is faster but was Unavailable at the time.
“Most of the grid was sequentially restored from Central and Eastern Regions where the hydro generation is located and towards Nairobi.
“By 1145 hrs today most of the transmission grid had been energized and normal power supply to customers restored as generations came on board.
“We are jointly working on having the Uganda interconnector restored so as to enhance our grid recovery efforts.
“Additionally, we are in the final stages of onboarding power from the Olkaria complex where most of the geothermal plants are located to allow the restoration of power supply to parts of Nairobi, Coast, Western, Central Rift, North Rift and South Nyanza that are still off supply.
“We shall continue to update as we finalise the restoration efforts. We apologise to our esteemed Customers for the inconvenience caused and thank them for their patience.”
