Cake, icing and power cuts

Wednesday 26th January, 2022

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa is reported to have directed Minister of Power Gamini Lokuge to ensure an uninterrupted power supply. The government would have us believe that enough fuel is provided to the CEB, and there will be no power cuts. Curiously, the CEB has announced a power-cut schedule! President of the CEB Engineers’ Union (CEBEU) Samuya Kumarawadu has said power cuts will be inevitable even if fuel is made available because the hydro power generation is expected to drop drastically. These contradictory statements have left the public confused.

Some of the policies of the incumbent dispensation have failed to work because they are not tempered with pragmatism. The government’s green agriculture programme serves as an example. The President’s renewable energy project also seems to have gone the same way; CEB engineers are stressing the need to step up thermal power generation to prevent blackouts. We quoted CEBEU Secretary Dhammika Wimalaratne yesterday as having said that the proposed fourth unit of the Norochcholai coal-fired power plant, if constructed, would provide a vital cushion with an additional 300MW, and what Sri Lanka needed was ‘an LNG-coal cake with solar and wind icing’.

CEBEU President Kumarawadu has told the media that if the Sampur coal-fired power plant had been built, an additional 500MW of electricity could have been added to the national grid, and there would have been no power crisis. Former President Maithripala Sirisena is often heard grumbling about power outages and blaming the CEB, but it is he who scrapped the Sampur project in 2015 without offering any viable alternative when he was the President. He obviously did not have the big picture in mind, and gave it the big I am for political reasons.

Coal combustion is a dirty process, as is public knowledge. Environmentalists are right in demanding that the country be weaned off coal and other fossil fuels used for power generation, but if the use of coal is to be discontinued without hurting the economy and causing hardships to the public, ways and means of meeting the resultant shortfall in the national power supply must be found.

Making agriculture and power generation eco-friendly is not only an uphill task but also a political high-wire act; balance is of the essence, and haste has to be avoided. As agrochemicals are to agriculture, so is coal to power generation. Everybody loves food free of harmful chemicals, but nobody is willing to contend with food shortages due to bans on agrochemicals! Similarly, nobody likes coal combustion, which pollutes the environment, but everybody wants an uninterrupted power supply! Successive governments have not adopted a pragmatic approach to solving these two problems; they have only resorted to vapid sloganeering and other such populist measures coupled with ad hoc measures without grasping the nettle.

Meanwhile, there is a pressing need for a proper assessment of the country’s power needs. Chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka (PUCSL), Janaka Ratnayake, has recently revealed that the CEB made 16 requests for emergency power purchases between 2016 and 2020, claiming that there was no other way to avert power cuts; 15 of those requests were turned down, but there were no power cuts, the PUCSL chief has said. If so, why on earth did the CEB seek to buy power? Did those who made those requests try to mislead the PUCSL and make the CEB purchase power unnecessarily so that they could line their pockets? Surprisingly, there has been no inquiry to find out why the CEB did so.

We are not short of experts of integrity who are willing to help the country sort out burning issues, and the need to seek their views when vital policies are formulated cannot be overemphasised. Short-term remedies such as making fuel available for the CEB’s thermal power plants are no doubt necessary to prevent blackouts, but the only way to avert a crippling power crisis is to augment the CEB’s generation capacity systematically. This is the challenge before the present government, which ought to bear in mind that pragmatism is the key.