Frequent power outages hurting Kenya's economy

The Kenya Power (KP) owes residents of Moi South lake region in Naivasha an explanation over frequent power outages.

This region that hosts some of the renowned hotels in the country and world leading flower farms is also a home to the Kengen Geothermal Plaza and company workers estates.

The area is frequented by local and international visitors and researchers who come to study geothermal activities and flower farming, not mentioning Lake Naivasha which is a designated world heritage site.

Apart from causing massive damage to businesses, the frequent outages have pushed many companies in the area, including Kengen to spend millions of shillings on diesel generators to operationalise their services.

And in the evening, the company workers retreat to their dark estates after working tirelessly to light the nation with the cheaper and clean geothermal power, only to resort to using dirt power to illuminate their households.

Expensive and hazardous

This is not only expensive but hazardous to the environment. This problem has persisted for long despite numerous concerns being raised.

Last year, when the region was thrown into near permanent darkness the KP’s MD Dr Ben Chumo attributed the frequent outages to the construction of the power line from Olkaria to evacuate geothermal power into the national grid.

But the line has long been completed and the problem still persists; it experiences several outages in a week and what is even more disturbing is the long duration taken by the KP to respond to the power failure.

While the Government prides itself for making wide strides to become the world’s leading producer of geothermal power and aims to produce 19,200 Mw against a demand of 15000Mw by 2030, the gains will remain a mirage if the sustainability and the security of the energy in terms of distribution is not assured to investors and citizens at large.

Alternatively, the lasting solution for ending these unnecessary outages which I believe is orchestrated by inept and gross mismanagement, is to end the monopoly of distribution of electricity because KP seems to be overwhelmed by the demand.