A team from the Kenya Electricity Transmission Company Ltd (KETRACO) yesterday paid a courtesy call on Kisumu Deputy Governor Dr. Mathew Owili.
The group which was on an inspection mission of the company’s projects in the region praised the county officials on the projects they are currently implementing which are geared towards ensuring that Kisumu and the region in general is energy sufficient by the year 2020.
The projects include the transmission line from the Olkaria Geothermal Plant to Lesos and terminating in Kisumu at the Kibos sub - station.
The multi-billion project is expected to transit 400KVA of power from Olkaria that will be stepped down to 220KVA at Lesos and further to 132KVA at the Kibos substations.
Kisumu is expected to be served by three rings that will deliver a total of 500KVA of power and acting as redundancy measures.
The Deputy Governor decried the persistent outages that the region faces and which have impacted very negatively on the business productivity.
Owili noted that with the upcoming special economic zone that the county is working in collaboration with Vision 2030, the demand is going skyrocket and hence need to plan well for the upsurge in demand.
The high cost of energy to the end user was also discussed with the County deputy Governor proposing to KETRACO that their agreements with KPLC in infrastructure returns should be structured in such a way that when the cost is finally pushed to the customer, it doesn’t become punitive.