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{
    "id": 1398868,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1398868/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 223,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Davis Chirchir",
    "speaker_title": "The Cabinet Secretary for Energy and Petroleum",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "The Kisumu-Muhoroni 132 KV line and the two 200 megawatt transformers at Dandora 220 substation, Kisumu- Muhoroni 132 line then tripped on an overload further, overloading the transformers at Dandora which tripped. With a trip of these critical lines and cascade trip of Juja, Naivasha, Kibos, Kisumu 132 to Moroni, the Western part of the country was kind of isolated. It was islanded and we then saw that partial challenge. This led to several imbalances in the system. When the system tried to balance itself in a very short time that imbalance really in terms of the cascading of the challenges caused that challenge of partial outage. As I said, this led to several imbalances in the system leading to the cascade trip of generators in Olkaria, Nairobi causing loss of Ethiopia transmission and Uganda imports and the loss of generation led to that partial collapse of the system. However, the Mt. Kenya grid system was islanded with generators at Kamburu and Gitaru running and tied to the customers connected to this part of the grid. You will note that because it was a partial outage, we were able to restore power within three and a half hours and so the restoration activities began at 2011 hours on the same day and supply to the customers was finally restored fully by 1.39 hours in the morning with sufficient generations availed. Hon. Senators, joint technical and operational teams in the energy sector have continuously reviewed such major disturbances with resultant improvements, and recommendations, some of which have been implemented. These endeavors and efforts have continued to reduce the frequency and severity of system disturbances, especially those that would cascade and lead to nationwide grid collapse despite its vulnerability. System defense mechanisms such as effective under-frequency load shedding are some of the strategies we have employed today and the provision of emergency overload capacity for critical transmission lines has been employed and is working well. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, what you will possibly notice for a while is that we have not seen some of these systems. What I am saying is, when we have an overload, we would rather pull down some of the feeders or de-load a network and not push power and overload the system that would cascade and cause a nationwide or the kind of partial blackout that we have been talking about. What we do, and you will possibly notice this more in the area of Bomet because of Muhoroni-Chemosit. When there is an overload in that line, because that line is built on a capacity of about 89 megawatts, and many times it will be carrying up to 120 or 140 megawatts in Muhoroni-Chemosit down to Sotik, all the way to Awendo. Sometimes we have to de-load the line by pulling some of the customers down so that we do not overload the country. So, some of the black holes that you see sometimes are what we are calling here ‘effective under frequency load shedding’ to manage the capacity of the system, so that in a way we are islanding, we are isolating the problem to that small area by bringing it down and, therefore, sustaining the rest of the country. However, the proposed key projects especially alternative transmission lines for evacuating power from key generation points, which are pending, pose a major challenge in operating the network optimally. We have attached a comprehensive list of recommended, critical grid enhancement projects, which are in various stages of implementation in the annex."
}