This morning, Kenyans woke up to a massive nationwide blackout that lasted for over 7 hours after Kenya Power’s plant at experienced yet another one of those recurrent faults that sent the Country into darkness. Yet again.
Some couple months ago,Kenya Power gave us one of the most ridiculous excuses after a similar blackout was experienced by blaming it all on a,wait for it,monkey that fell into the
The World laughed at us. And we couldn’t bear the insult.
And today,at around 5.30am in the morning,some technical hitch affected power supply nationwide with Kenya Power officials falling over themselves trying to explain away the anomaly,as they always do.
Many Kenyans took to social media to pontificate on the matter, as usual,with 99% of them,especially those nutcases on Twitter, making absolutely no sense at all.
Power was restored alright but one brilliant man’s Facebook analysis of Kenya Power is sweeping the Internet for its brilliance,spot on points,urgency,potency and naked truth.
After all the kerfuffle had died down,Facebook user Gabriel Oguda carefully took to his account to share some deep – and disturbing – wisdom on the many errors Kenya Pepper should really be rectifying and what National Electricity really means for the survival of a nation.
He starts his musing with a little incident that happened in California, USA but by the time he’s done with the lecture,you’ll be sitting up and wondering how we’ve escaped a pure apocalyptic catastrophe for this long.
Kenya Power has been put on the spot in a way that no one ever has.
Check out the message and thank God we’ve not seen the worst of days yet.
With close to a thousand LIKES and over 300 shares,this is a classic piece you ought to take seriously. Very seriously.
This morning, Kenyans woke up to a national power blackout; Flights at the JKIA were delayed, the Port of Mombasa had to use cranes in the ships to offload cargo as they could not use the ones off-shore. Kenyans took to social media to rant all-day telling Kenya Power that we cant keep working like this. It is barely two months since a vervet monkey scaled the electric fence at the Gitaru hydroelectric power generation plant and plunged the whole country into darkness.
Let me tell you something.
On April 16th 2013, two gunmen walked into the San Jose Power Generation & Electricity substation, in California, USA, and took down ten transformers and three transformer banks at the time, in what was widely seen as an act of sabotage. Though the resulting power outages were minor, the gunmen did briefly knock out landline, 911, and cell service around the area.
The people of California were taken aback. That isolated incident raised worrying concerns that the US government was not adequately protecting its national electricity physical infrastructure. Initially, the raid was seen as an act of vandalism, but investigators combing through the incident started getting worried that the attack showed a level of sophistication that may have signalled future ones. “I don’t think we have the level of physical security we need”, John Wellinghoff, then chairman of the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said afterwards in a statement which prompted the FERC to launch an inquest into the the level, and extent, of US preparedness if terrorists were to take down power grids in the country.
The verdict of the inquest was scathingly raw, and I quote; “…that of the 55,000 substations in the USA, there are 30 that play a critical role in the nations grid operations”, adding that “…if any nine, of the 30, were to be taken down by enemies of the US, the US would suffer coast-to-coast blackouts lasting 18 months or more.” When pushed, by journalists, to name the 9 key substations that holds the US economy by the windpipe, the FERC declined to give names saying only a select few of the nation’s security decision makers have the list, and for obvious reasons.
And that is the subject of this post.
Unlike the United States, Kenya has not many power stations to bank on if any of them were to be taken from the national grid. The hydroelectric power station at Gitaru is the largest, thus far. At 225MW to the national grid, Gitaru is the single most power supplier of all the 32 currently operational. If completed, in 2017, as planned, the Lamu Coal Power Plant, in Lamu County, will shoot to the top of big feeders – adding 960MW to the grid. Also watch out for the Dongo Kundu Thermal Power Station, in Mombasa County, that will inject 700MW into the supply line. The Meru & Turkana Wind projects, will also inject a collective additional supply of 700MW to the grid. But we will have to wait until 2018 for their turbines to begin roaring.
Meaning we’re still stuck with Gitaru perching on top. That monkey who scaled the 100-foot-tall dam holding back the Tana River and jumped into the main transformer feeding us with 180MW of power should never have made it to the world headlines. At any given time, whenever there is a blackout of national concern, the first point of checkup will be with the engineers at Gitaru.
But it could also be elsewhere – because Gitaru produces only 10% of our national power supply.
Today, the blackout we experienced from 5.30am has been traced back to the tripping of the main Olkaria-Nairobi supply line. I just love the way our power men are eager to send statements to press without checking whether this information could land in the wrong hands and be used against us, in the long run. The Olkaria I geothermal power plant, in Nakuru County, sends us 185MW to the national grid – too significant an energy outlay, and a national security installation, to be exposed just like that.
Thanks to the overzealous KPLC & KenGen communication department, we now know that if you wanted to paralyse the economy of this country, all you need to do is to start breeding monkeys in large numbers, fit them with explosive devises, and send them to scale up the high walls of our two power-generation plants. All they have to do is to drop down the main transformer and we are up and running in setting this country into a monumental chaos we wouldn’t recover from.
We keep telling social media users to desist from posting personal information that might be used against them online, but we haven’t yet fully fathomed the extent of the damage to our country if a terrorist organization would draw a plan to attack those two power stations on the eve of the general elections next year.
I want to tell you here, for free, that if anything were to happen to Olkaria and Gitaru and this country gets plunged into darkness on the eve of voting day, we will be dead meat. Jubilee will accuse CORD of planning violence under darkness. CORD will accuse Jubilee of switching off the lights deliberately to rig the vote. The day Kenyans will begin treating power blackouts as a national security issue is the day we shall see the danger we pose to ourselves whenever we allow mischievous monkeys to play with our peaceful coexistence.
“Before stopping terrorism, find the real terrorist.” – Pari
Kenya Power,did you hear that?
