Why national blackout would soon be a thing of the past

The Saturday morning disappointment consequent of a national power outage must have thrown a lot into jeopardy, half of the day’s economy was lost. Small traders lost revenue that if summed up amounts to millions of shillings. The toddlers missed out on their favorite batman and spider man animations, battery low problems, the showers compounded with the chilly weather were unbearable, literally everything went static. To a young engineer like myself I was reminded of my higher calling and how so important my profession is to this economy.

I am not trying to hold brief for Kenya power as to the cause of the unfortunate Saturday incident but there are apparent facts that someone of my profession and level of interest can easily infer. Over time the agenda by government has been to attain universal power supply to each home and village. This first means our infrastructure network is soaring. Secondly, it means that today’s grid system is getting more complex than ever before. Automation of grid system monitoring has been greatly deployed but automation equipment is not exempted from failure. At some point contractors were getting away with shoddy built lines another complexity, though lately the state power giant has reigned in and given strong instructions to these pseudo contractors. Our grid system is also aging which is an indictment when it comes to the question of reliability of our grid system. Infrastructural development such as the ring roads and SGR are massively displacing the grid. In a nutshell, our grid system is on an ever dynamic trajectory.