Six Days After a Transformer Failed, Ethiopian Electric Power Is Still Choosing Between Two Repairs

Ethiopian Electric Power says it has put two options on the table for repairing the failure at the Addis West power distribution station, and is moving to carry the work out. It has not said which option it will take, and it has declined to give a completion date.

The utility's explanation for that is technical rather than evasive: the repair involves several different kinds of work, and it says it is difficult to state with certainty that the job will be finished within any particular period.

Six days is no longer an interruption

The outage began after a sudden transformer failure at the Addis West substation, which the Ethiopian Electricity Service announced in a statement. By the utility's own account, affected parts of Addis Abeba have now gone six days on degraded or absent supply. It published a list of the neighbourhoods carrying the load.

Six days is past the point where a business treats an outage as an interruption and starts treating it as an operating condition. Generator fuel at retail prices, spoiled stock in cold chains, shifts that cannot be run, and payment terminals that cannot reach a network are all costs that accrue daily and none of them are recoverable. For firms that had already built diesel into their cost base, this is a larger monthly bill; for those that had not, it is a question of whether to open.

The absence of a date is the part that is hardest to plan around. A firm told the supply will return on Thursday can decide what to do until Thursday. A firm told the work is technically complicated cannot.

Open

Ethiopian Electric Power has not said which of the two repair options it has selected, what each would cost, or how long either would take. It has not said what caused the transformer to fail, whether the same equipment elsewhere on the network is exposed to the same fault, or whether affected customers will see any adjustment on their bills.

Sources: Tikvah Ethiopia, 27 September 2026