President William Ruto has directed Energy Cabinet Secretary Davis Chirchir to comprehensively address the challenge of power outages.
Ruto who chaired a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, December 23 observed that frequent power outages were hurting the country’s investment profile.
The Cabinet also resolved that the transmission line system should be unbundled so that power failure in one part does not affect the whole country.
The Cabinet noted that the Bomet-Narok line will be constructed with €400 million (Sh66 billion) from the African Development Bank to address congestion on transmission lines that cause blackouts.
According to the Cabinet the line, which was funded in 2016, has not been constructed due to legal disputes.
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The Cabinet further stated that a €1.2 billion (Sh200 billion) KenGen solar power project at the Seven Forks Dam will provide a safeguard against power failure. The project is expected to save hydro-power at the five dams that make up the Seven Forks.
This comes after CS Chirchir pointed out that the frequent nationwide power outages are due to a lack of investments in the electricity networks.
Speaking on Monday, the energy CS noted that the government has invested in connecting customers and building industries but has not built a power network in the last seven years.
“We have continued to connect customers on the last mile, we have continued to build industries and we have not built a network in the last six, seven years and there is much constrain in the transmission of electricity from where it is generated and sometimes the network drips when it is overloaded,” said Chirchir.
