Kenya Begins Electricity Rationing as Power Demand Outpaces Supply
Kenya has been forced to start rationing electricity as the country’s power demand just keeps outstripping what they have available, and so they’re having to rely more on imports from neighbours Ethiopia and Uganda.
President William Ruto’s confirmed that Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC) has got orders to do some controlled blackouts between 5 and 10 p.m. in order to try and keep the grid from getting totally overwhelmed.
“In Kenya, we’re having to do load shedding between 5 and 10 pm, because quite simply we just don’t have enough juice going around. So we turn off the power in certain places so we can give it to other places that really need it,” Ruto said out at the UN Second World Summit for Social Development in Doha, Qatar.
That’s all coming on top of a pretty hefty rise in energy demand that’s putting a lot of strain on Kenya’s ability to generate enough power to go around. And as a result, the country’s had to increase its reliance on electricity coming in from elsewhere. Imports from Ethiopia have shot up from 337 million kWh in 2022 to a whopping 1.53 billion kWh by June this year – that’s roughly 10.6% of all the power that Kenya Power’s brought in during that time.
The reason for all of this is a bit of a double whammy – first of all, domestic supply has been going down, and secondly, the country’s energy infrastructure is getting a bit long in the tooth. Another reason you’re seeing power rationing – particularly out the west of the country – is because a bit of a stop-start business has been going on with getting in new power – that’s been on since September last year, and it’s supposed to be a temporary fix to give the system a bit of breathing space during the really busy hours of the day.
Trouble is, the government’s been keeping a lid on the power purchase agreements for years now, which has meant that they haven’t been able to get any new, cheaper sources of power hooked up to the grid. That all kicked off in 2018 and got extended by Parliament, but it was meant to be a temporary thing to sort out the existing deals – but it’s ended up keeping new power out of the system.
According to the Energy Ministry, Kenya put out 7,222.37 GWh of electricity in the first half of the last financial year – that’s a rise of 6.13% on the year before. Geothermal energy leads the pack, making up about 40% of all the electricity they managed to generate, and a bit of extra rain helped out with hydropower, bumping that up to 24.7%.
With demand for power just going up and up and local generation not quite keeping pace, the government’s saying the current rationing measures are a necessary evil to stop the system getting overwhelmed and potentially going dark all over the country.
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Kenya Begins Electricity Rationing as Power Demand Outpaces Supply