Droughts causing power blackouts in hydro-dependent Kenya

By MICHAEL BURNHAM AND NATHANIAL GRONEWOLD of Greenwire
Published: May 10, 2010

NAIROBI, Kenya — The restaurant manager shrugs as his customers eat in darkness and his kitchen limps along on half power. “What they told us in the newspaper last week was that one section of the city would have a blackout for maintenance purposes, but right now the whole city is down,” said Nicholas Kyalo, whose restaurant, Garit, serves fast food in the capital’s downtown core. At lunchtime most of the city’s electricity is down for the second time in a week. Garit’s cooks stand idly as they wait their turn on the only working fryer, and other staffers scramble to start emergency generators before food spoils in the refrigerator. Blackouts are a regular occurrence in this city and throughout Africa, and the problem is getting worse. Shop owners can be seen dragging out diesel generators and firing them up in the streets. Restaurants have gotten so used to blackouts that they design their menus around them. “When there is a blackout and you have something go bad, that’s a risk and a loss to you,” Kyalo said. Nairobi goes dark not for its lack of coal or natural gas, but for a lack of water. Hydroelectric dams generate more than 60 percent of Kenya’s power, much of it coming from a string of dams along the Tana River. During the 2009 dry spell, rationing was the rule and some sections of the city had power for just two days a week. A deepening drought cycle now threatens to spread Kenya’s energy crisis beyond its borders to other parts of Africa, especially Tanzania and Ethiopia. … Kenya’s population is growing fast, rising from 30 million people to more than 36 million in the past decade. The water table is also falling, because a deepening drought cycle that could be a result of global climate change but also a consequence of the destruction of forest cover that serves as “water towers” for the Tana and other rivers. … Last year, water levels at Masinga Reservoir reached their lowest in 60 years, closing a major dam and taking 40 MW of capacity off the grid. The remaining dams delivered far less electricity than they were designed to. The 2009 drought may have been the worst in recent memory but not the longest, officials say. “There are times when we had droughts for almost a similar period, but the levels never came down to that extent,” said Christopher Maende, chief engineer at Kenya Electricity Generating Co. Ltd., or KenGen, Kenya’s largest power generator. Maende fears what an even longer dry spell would do. …

Droughts Turn Out the Lights in Hydro-Dependent African Nation