NAIROBI (Reuters) -Kenya suffered its second major blackout in a week on Friday, although electricity was restored to 70% of customers by late afternoon, national distributor Kenya Power and the energy minister said.
The power cut was caused when a transmission line tripped at a substation, followed by a second trip on the Ethiopia-Kenya high voltage transmission line, Energy Minister Opiyo Wandayi said in a statement.
“The loss of 488MW, accounting for 27.3% of the total generation, resulted in cascade failure and a partial collapse of the grid,” Wandayi said.
“What we are witnessing today has built up over time and is a result of sub-optimal investment in infrastructure.”
The outage, which affected several regions of East Africa’s biggest economy, followed another hours-long blackout on Aug. 30.
Kenya has suffered a series of blackouts over the last year, including one that plunged Nairobi’s main airport into darkness.
(Reporting by Hereward Holland, George Obulutsa and Humphrey Malalo; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Andrew Cawthorne and Mark Heinrich)
