NAIROBI, Dec 11 (Reuters) – Kenya will consider small-scale, scheduled power outages, technically known as load-shedding, to contain demand surges that have been blamed for frequent national blackouts this year, its energy minister said on Monday.

The East African nation suffered a country-wide blackout on Sunday evening, which lasted several hours, angering many people because it is the latest in at least four that have hit this year so far.

Davis Chirchir, the energy minister, blamed an overload on a transmission line in western Kenya for the latest outage, and pledged some short-term actions to remedy the situation.

“We will be scheduling some minimal load-shedding,” he told a news conference, referring to particular lines such as the one that caused Sunday’s blackout.

The line, which is designed to carry 80 megawatts of electricity, was carrying 149 megawatts when it tripped and caused the entire grid to go out, Chirchir said.

“The gist of it is lack of investment in the network for a long time,” the minister said, citing increased connections of households to electricity and the establishment of new industries that require power, which were not matched by grid upgrades.

The government will build a new transmission line in the west of the country, Chirchir said, to increase the grid’s capacity and prevent the system from being tripped up by system overloads.

The new line will be financed by cash from South Korea and the African Development Bank, the minister said, without giving a figure.

The government is also investing in electricity generation to boost reserves, he said.

Sunday’s blackout frustrated many Kenyans, who expressed their anger in online platforms including Facebook.

The blackout also plunged two terminals at the main airport in Nairobi into darkness after the stand-by generators failed to kick in automatically.

(Reporting by Duncan Miriri, Editing by Louise Heavens)