Blame game as Turkana plant distances itself from power outage

Lake Turkana Wind Power plant has dismissed reports by Kenya Power that it was responsible for the nationwide supply interruption that rocked the country from Friday.

The plant in a statement on Saturday night said the plant was forced to go offline and stop generation following an overvoltage in the national grid which caused the power plant to go off automatically to avoid extreme damage.

'Lake Turkana Wind Power (LTWP) wishes to assert that it has not caused the current power outage. The conclusion that the grid system overvoltage caused this issue is supported by preliminary reports and analysis undertaken by the relevant independent industry stakeholders,' the statement reads.

According to LTWP, at the time the plant was forced to switch off, it was producing 270MW out of the national total of 1855MW which accounts for 14.6 per cent.

'The large drop in generation output following the grid system instability resulted in a situation that national power supply was interrupted,' it said.

'Typically this interruption would be immediately compensated by other power generators in the system,' it adds.

LTWP said since the plant switched off on Friday, it is yet to resume operations adding that there has been further interruptions and outages in the national grid since then, which is beyond the plant's making.

The interruptions, they said, have in fact made it hard for the plant to resume operations until all the other interruptions are resolved.

'At the present, we are doing whatever we can to support the immediate restoration of power to every consumer in the country,' it asserted.

Their statement comes barely hours after Kenya Power attributed the nationwide blackout to a loss of 270MW from LTWP.

Kenya Power in their Saturday night update on the restoration progress said the loss triggered an imbalance in the power system and 'tripped all other main generation units and stations'.