Kenya Power may soon be forced to compensate prepaid and postpaid customers in the event of unannounced power blackouts. This will start to happen if proposed regulations that have been gazetted for public scrutiny are adopted and passed.
Under the new regulations, Kenya Power will be forced to give consumers on prepaid plans free tokens whenever there is unannounced power outage. Consumers on postpaid will get credits on their next monthly bills.
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“A Licensee shall be liable to pay appropriate compensation to a person if there is breach in quality of supply or irregularity of electricity supply by the Licensee, provided that the breach is reported to the Licensee in writing within thirty (30) days of occurrence of the breach,” the proposed regulations state.
“The Licensee may elect to make payment for compensation in the form of; credit on the next monthly bill for customers who receive a bill or prepaid electricity token.” These regulations have been proposed by the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority (EPRA).
According to the regulations, the EPRA will determine the compensation affected power consumers should receive by measuring their average power consumption and the applicable tariff band.
These regulations come in the wake of unannounced national power outages that have increased over the past several months. The latest of these national outages occurred on May 2 this year. This outage was blamed on what Kenya Power termed as a “system disturbance on the grid, resulting in power supply disruption in most parts of the country.”
There was yet another unplanned nationwide power outage in December was blamed on a system overload. “The overload witnessed along the Kisumu -Muhuroni line which only carries 80 mega watts. Yesterday the line was carrying 149 Megawatts,” Energy Cabinet Secretary Davis Chirchir had said. The CS further proposed that the ministry would start load shedding.
“The gist of it is lack of investment in the network for a long time. The country has not had investments for the power transmission system networks for over six years. Government waiting for taxes to build the networks is what has caused this problem,” he said.
