Electricity supply in most parts of Kenya has been restored after the country plunged into a blackout following the failure of its national power grid, officials said.
“We have lost bulk power supply to various parts of the country due to a system disturbance, and we are working to restore normalcy within the shortest time possible,” said Kenya Power in a statement.
Later, the utility company said a fault had caused the outage at the Isinya substation.
The blackout, which impacted much of the country, started at 3.55 pm on Thursday and lasted for nearly 4 hours before power was restored in some areas.
“We have restored power supply to customers in parts of Western, South Nyanza, North Rift, Central Rift and Nairobi,” it said at 5:25 pm.
“The cause of the system disturbance has been identified and is being addressed by the Kenya Electricity Transmission Company (Ketraco) engineers while our technical teams are working on the restoration of power supply to the rest of the country,” it assured.
The Isinya substation in Kajiado County complements similar facilities in Rabai, Mombasa.
The substation, which is connected to the Olkaria geothermal fields through the Suswa substation, has a capacity of 1,000 megawatts.
Currently, Ketraco is conducting system reinforcement of the Isinya 400/220kV substation aimed at improving the transfer capacity of electrical energy and addressing the challenge of low voltages, high transmission losses, the unreliability of supply and network security.
