Lake Turkana Wind Power (LTWP) plant has dismissed reports by Kenya Power that it was responsible for the nationwide supply interruption that affected the country from Friday.
In a statement on Saturday night, the plant said it was forced to go offline and stop generation following an overvoltage in the national grid which caused the power plant to go off automatically to avoid extreme damage.
The plant said going offline causes the wind power plant to automatically switch off.
“The conclusion that the grid system overvoltage caused this issue is supported by preliminary reports and analysis undertaken by the relevant independent industry stakeholders,” the plant said.
“At the time LTWP was forced to switch off, it was producing 270MW out of a national total of 1855MW (14.6%). The large drop in generation output, following the grid system instability, resulted in a situation that national power supply was interrupted. Typically, this interruption would be immediately compensated for by other power generators in the system.”
The plant has not yet been brought back into operation since it was switched off on Friday evening.
LTWP was responding to a statement by Kenya Power in which it was blamed for the power interruption after losing 270MW generation.
“The loss triggered an imbalance in the power system and tripped all other main generation units and stations, leading to a total outage on the grid. While there are situations where a plant could trip, our technical teams are analyzing the data from the protection relays to establish the root cause of the trip which caused a cascade failure of the system,” Kenya Power said.
Kenya Power in its Saturday night update on the restoration progress said the loss triggered an imbalance in the power system and ‘tripped all other main generation units and stations’.
