Quality of power supply queried as Kenya suffers major blackout

Kenya Power workers fix a transformer at Ndimaini Village in Karatina, Nyeri. December 28, 2020. [File, Standard]

A nationwide power failure on Wednesday night brought critical sectors of the Kenyan economy to a standstill, as the quality of electricity supply was brought to question once again.

The blackout, which struck at 9:05 pm, hit a large swathe of the country, leaving households and the key industrial zones in darkness for hours. 

The cost was immediate and deep even as the government stayed mum amid mounting frustration among Kenyans over the disruptive perennial blackouts. 

Across the country, the growing sight of rooftop solar panels and humming diesel generators has become emblematic of a deepening lack of trust in the electricity distributor. 

Industrial users, wealthy households, and even small-scale traders are increasingly disconnecting from the national grid entirely—a structural shift the utility admits is threatening its revenue base.

"Kenya Power has become a bill collector for a service they rarely deliver," said John Mwangi, a small-scale manufacturer in Naivasha who installed a solar system six months ago.

"The cost of switching was high, but the cost of staying on the grid—lost business, spoiled goods—was higher."

The defection is supported by economic data. 

The Kenya Association of Manufacturers (KAM) Barometer shows that over 64.29 per cent of firms are grappling with rising raw material costs. 

Consequently, 62.5 per cent of industrial players have completely frozen new investment plans for the next six months. 

With 66.67 per cent of manufacturers expecting their workforce to shrink, a combination of high operational costs and unreliable power is pushing the economy toward deindustrialization.

The reliability of electricity supply is still way below the regulator's threshold, with some indices, such as duration of interruption scoring, six times below the target. 

The duration of interruption, an index that can be used to determine the period of a blackout, averaged 8.39 hours a month in the six months to December 2025. 

The target by Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (Epra) is 1.50 hours. 

EPRA says in its biannual statistics report for 2025/2026 that in the period, customers’ outage durations reduced to an average of 8.39 hours per month, down from 9.15 hours per month recorded in a similar period in the previous year. 

"This exceeded the Authority’s target for this index that was set at 1.50 hours per month. October had the highest outage duration of 9.83 hours while July recorded the lowest outage duration of 7.18 hours," says the regulator. 

Wednesday’s collapse comes barely 15 months after Energy Cabinet Secretary Opiyo Wandayi publicly warned Kenya Power management to curb inefficiency, promising a reduction in system losses from 24 per cent to 19.5 per cent within three years. 

Yet, the company’s 2024-25 Integrated Annual Report published recently reveals that system losses remain stubbornly high at 21.21 per cent.

Despite a Sh29.4 billion capital injection into grid expansion and reinforcement, the company's own audited financials expose systemic rot. 

The Office of the Auditor-General (OAG) also found that Kenya Power is systematically obscuring the true scale of blackouts. 

A review of the data revealed 62 separate outages recorded in manual regional logs that were never uploaded to the central Incident Management System. 

Additionally, 23 incidents had significant timing discrepancies between manual and digital records, suggesting the utility is underreporting outage durations to artificially inflate its performance metrics.

These performance metrics—Saidi (System Average Interruption Duration Index) and Saifi (System Average Interruption Frequency Index)—are supposed to measure how many hours a customer goes without power and how often it happens. 

While Kenya Power claims these metrics improved to 113 hours and 44.07 respectively, the OAG report states the utility failed to meet its own internal SAIDI target of 30 hours, rendering the glossy "improvement" claims effectively meaningless.

Further undermining reliability is the failure of infrastructure upgrades. 

The OAG audit notes that 7,740 customer-funded electricity connection projects—worth over Sh877 million—have still not commenced, leaving thousands of households and businesses waiting in the dark despite paying upfront fees. 

At the same time, off-grid stations intended to provide alternative power are falling apart. 

About 25 diesel generators are non-operational due to a lack of maintenance, and solar-powered hybrid plants remain abandoned and idle.

In the six months under review, the Epra report notes that the average outage duration, Saidi, decreased to 2.38 hours compared with 2.56 hours recorded in a similar period of the previous year. 

"This exceeded the Authority’s set target of 1.36 hours for the financial year 2025/26," says EPRA. "The shortest restoration time was recorded in September at 2.11 hours while the longest was in October at 2.60 hours."

For Saifi, the index that represents how often outages occured, EPRA notes that there was a slight improvement of 0.05 in the period under review. 

"Customers experienced an average of 3.52 interruptions per month in the period under review, down from 3.57 interruptions per month recorded in the half year ended December 2024. This, however, was still higher than the 1.10 interruptions threshold per month set by the Authority," says the regulator. 

Kenya's power reliability has always been one of the major challenges highlighted by enterprises whenever conversations on business environment ate held. 

In a discussion between KAM and Kenya Power officials held in June, the lobby insisted that access to affordable, reliable, and high-quality electricity remains one of the most critical enablers of manufacturing competitiveness. 

In this forum that manufacturers noted that frequent unplanned outages and voltage fluctuations continue to disrupt production processes, damage sensitive equipment, increase operational costs, and affect delivery timelines. 

"For manufacturers operating continuous production lines, a brief interruption can translate into significant financial losses, wastage of raw materials, missed market opportunities, and reduced competitiveness," read a statement from KAM on the meeting.