How to compensate power consumers for blackouts

 By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

07 June 2015

Last month, I experienced a two-day long power blackout. This was the longest outage I have ever seen in my entire life; and I’m not a young person – I am older than three quarters of all human beings in the world today!

The truth is that we have too many blackouts! I lived in the United Kingdom from 1986 to 1990 (but do I say?) and, in that four-year period, I did not see a single power outage. Not even one!

Now think about it: we import all our power supply equipment from the same factories that the UK electricity companies get theirs. Why then is it that they don’t get blackouts while we have so many. There must be a problem with either the people who manage our system, or the way we manage these people.

I believe the problem is in the way the people in charge are managed. They do not suffer directly when there is a blackout. So there is no motivation to prevent outages or even to act fast when one does occur.

Suppose we introduced the compensation programme where customers are paid for every blackout incident? It might work like this…

For every blackout that lasts less than one hour, each affected customer is paid Sh580. I chose this figure because it is the same amount that Kenya Power charges for reconnecting customers whose supply has been disconnected due to late payment of bills.

After one hour in the dark, the customers are added further compensation based on their individual consumption patterns. Now, if your supply is disconnected, Kenya Power insists that you must increase your deposit to two and a half time your average monthly consumption for the last three months.

The same can be done for the blackout compensation. My bills for February, March and April were Sh4,916, Sh6,589 and Sh6,846, respectively. The average of is Sh6,117. Two and a half times of this is Sh15,292.5. Working with a 30-day month brings the daily amount to Sh510; or Sh21.24 per hour.

Now, during the great blackout of last month, I was in the dark for 42 hours. So my compensation would be Sh580 plus Sh871 (=Sh21.24 x 41); that is, Sh1,451. Now that’s just for me; I estimate that at about 500 of my neighbours were also affected so the combined amount comes to about Sh725,000 – assuming that their consumption is similar to mine.

The big question is: where would all this money come from? From the company’s profits? No!

Profits don’t belong to the company; they belong to the shareholders. Penalising the shareholders will not improve operational performance of the company!

Therefore, the people to pay for the compensation should be the workers employed by the company. They are the ones responsible for the daily operation of the power supply system; so, they should pay when it fails! Next week, I will propose a mechanism for collecting the compensation money from the payroll.