Kenya Power notified its customers that the prepaid token purchase system will be unavailable on Saturday, September 9, starting from 11:50 p.m. to Sunday, September 10 at 5:00 a.m.
In a notice, the utility firm noted that the shutdown was to allow for essential maintenance.
To avoid inconveniences, the utility firm advised customers to load tokens on time to avoid being left in the dark during the maintenance period.
Kenya Power expressed regret for any inconvenience this temporary shutdown may cause its customers and assured them that maintenance is essential to further enhance their services.
“During this time, customers will not be able to purchase electricity tokens via prepaid Paybill number 888880 or Airtel Money,” Kenya Power’s statement read in part.
“We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause to our customers,” the company noted.
The routine maintenance comes weeks after the country suffered a nationwide blackout. Some of Kenya’s more than 50 million people, including in the capital, Nairobi, saw power return almost 24 hours after the massive outage.
Hundreds of people were stranded in darkness for hours at Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) due to a faulty backup generator.
Later, Kenya Power blamed the outage on a loss of power generation from the Lake Turkana Wind Power plant, Africa’s largest wind farm, causing an imbalance that “tripped all other main generation units and stations, leading to a total outage on the grid.”
But Lake Turkana Wind Power in a statement denied it was to blame. Instead, it said it had been forced to go offline by an “overvoltage situation in the national grid system which, to avoid extreme damage, causes the wind power plant to automatically switch off.”
The plant had been producing nearly 15 per cent of the national output at the time.
Kenya Power has yet to give a detailed report on the cause of the nationwide outage.
