Ethiopian Electric Power Authority says Electric blackout was caused by system instability
Ethiopia’s power grid failed on Saturday evening around 6 p.m. local time and triggered a nationwide blackout.
The country’s power utility said it had restored electricity to half of the country, including most parts of the capital Addis Ababa, by around 10:20 pm (1920 GMT).
The Ethiopian Electric Power Authority attributed the outage to “system instability” and urged the public to remain calm as teams work to restore electricity across the country.
This comes months after Ethiopia recovered from a five-hour power outage on March 28, which left most regions without electricity, except for Bahir Dar and its surroundings in the Amhara region.
Authorities have not yet disclosed the cause of that earlier blackout.
The Horn of Africa nation is home to 120 million people, the second largest population in Africa.
It first began generating power from the controversial Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile in February 2022, and in August of that year announced a second turbine had begun producing electricity.
Ethiopia sells electricity to Kenya, Sudan, and Djibouti and has signed memorandums of understanding with South Sudan, Tanzania, and Somaliland.
The Ethiopian Electric Power Authority (EELPA) was established in 1955 to manage all of Ethiopia’s electricity-related activities. The EELPA was restructured in 1996 and split into two companies: the Ethiopia Electric Authority (EEA) and the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation (EEPCo). In 2013, EEPCo was split again into two companies: Ethiopian Electric Power (EEP) and Ethiopian Electric Utility (EEU). 
