A meeting between President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and representatives of the Sri Lanka Scout Association was held at the Presidential Secretariat on Thursday (10)  afternoon .

The President was briefed on the 11th National Scout Jamboree, scheduled to be held in Sri Lanka in January 2027, as well as the current status and progress of its organisational arrangements.

The official logo of the National Scout Jamboree was also presented to the President and officially unveiled on the occasion.

Views were also exchanged on the programmes currently being implemented by the Sri Lanka Scout Association and its future plans.

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake emphasised the importance of expanding the Scout Movement to more schools and the contribution that the Scout Movement can make to the Government’s programmes to combat drugs.

President’s Senior Additional Secretary Roshan Gamage; Chief Scout Commissioner, Attorney-at-Law Manoj Nanayakkara; President of the Sri Lanka Scout Association Ransiri Perera; Deputy Chief Scout Commissioner (Acting) Kapila Perera; Chairman of the Executive Committee Kamalnath Jinadasa; and Jamboree Co-Organising Commissioner, Engineer Amil Abeysundara, were among the senior representatives of the Sri Lanka Scout Association who attended the occasion.

[President’s Media Division]

A meeting between President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and Catholic religious leaders, led by His Eminence Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, Archbishop of Colombo, was held at the Presidential Secretariat on Thursday (10).

Special attention was given to the Government’s programme to strengthen coexistence, peace and reconciliation among all communities in the country and to ensure national unity by preventing any form of racist or religiously motivated hate activity.

The progress of investigations into the Easter Sunday attacks was also discussed.

Lengthy discussions were held on measures that could be taken to prevent environmental damage and destruction affecting the lives of the people.

The Catholic religious leaders commended the measures taken by the Government to safeguard trust among all communities and expressed their fullest support for these efforts.

The issues faced by Catholic communities, including infrastructure development in areas where Catholic people reside, as well as measures that should be taken to address these issues, were also discussed at length.

Rev. Fr. Cyril Gamini, Rev. Fr. Julian Patrick and other priests, as well as Deputy Minister of Religious and Cultural Affairs Muneer Mulaffer, President’s Senior Additional Secretary Roshan Gamage and others, were also present at the meeting.

President’s Media Division (PMD)

BY IfhAm NIzAm

Sri Lanka could soon face a new electricity-grid challenge—not from too little power, but from having too much solar generation in the wrong places and at the wrong times, a former Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) General Manager told The Island.

The former CEB GM who insisted not to be named warned that the rapid growth of rooftop and utility-scale solar could place increasing pressure on CEB and LECO distribution feeders, substations and the national grid unless transmission, storage and grid-management systems are upgraded at the same pace.

“The issue is no longer simply how much solar we can install. The question is whether the grid can absorb those electrons when and where they are produced,” he told The Island.

He said Sri Lanka should learn from China and India, where the enormous expansion of renewable generation is now forcing policymakers to focus increasingly on storage, transmission capacity, intelligent dispatch and grid flexibility.

“China has already exceeded 1.28 TW of installed solar, while India’s grid-connected installed solar capacity stood at around 162.15 GW as of June 30, 2026. The difficult question now is what you actually do with so much solar when everyone is generating at almost the same time,” he said.

For Sri Lanka, he said, the warning is particularly relevant to the distribution network.

A feeder carrying a high concentration of rooftop solar can, during periods of strong sunshine and low local demand, move from the traditional one-way flow of electricity towards consumers to reverse power flow back towards the transformer and upstream network.

“That means the feeder is no longer simply a one-way road for electricity. At certain times of the day, it becomes a two-way road,” he said.

This can create voltage-rise, protection-coordination and transformer-loading issues and could eventually limit the amount of additional rooftop solar that can safely be connected to particular feeders.

“What matters is where those megawatts are connected,” he told The Island.

He said Sri Lanka therefore needs to begin looking at solar hosting capacity feeder by feeder and substation by substation, rather than treating the national grid as having unlimited capacity to absorb new distributed generation.

The problem is compounded by the evening transition, when solar generation falls rapidly just as electricity demand can increase.

“If the system has a lot of solar in the middle of the day and then loses that generation rapidly in the evening, something else has to respond. That is a flexibility problem,” he said.

This is where battery energy storage systems (BESS) are likely to become increasingly important—but the former CEB chief cautioned against allowing cheap imported battery hardware to drive the market.

“Sri Lanka could soon have huge BESS demand, very cheap battery hardware and everyone suddenly becoming a BESS pundit. What could possibly go wrong?” he said.

He cited fire safety, degradation, poor integration, weak energy-management systems, questionable warranties, incorrect sizing, inappropriate grid locations and poor thermal management as major risks.

“A system can look fantastic in Excel on Day One but perform very differently in Year Two,” he told The Island.

He said the future BESS market would therefore be determined less by who could supply the cheapest container and more by who understood the complete system.

“The future BESS business will not be about who can assemble the cheapest container. It will be about who understands battery, PCS, EMS, grid, safety, degradation and dispatch economics as one system,” he said.

For Sri Lanka, storage should also be considered as a distribution-grid asset, rather than solely as a large transmission-level installation.

Strategically located batteries could absorb excess rooftop solar on constrained feeders during the middle of the day and release electricity later when local demand rises, potentially reducing network congestion and improving the value of distributed generation.

“The question is not simply, ‘How many megawatt-hours of batteries do we need?’ The question is, ‘Where does the battery create the greatest system value?’” he said.

He said China’s and India’s experience could broadly be viewed as three stages: Phase One—build solar and wind; Phase Two—build storage; and Phase Three—redesign the grid around renewables.

Sri Lanka, he said, should learn from that progression before renewable penetration makes grid problems significantly more expensive to solve.

“Installing another large amount of solar is one thing. Absorbing those electrons when the sun is shining everywhere at once is quite another,” he said.

“Solar taught us how to generate cheap electrons. BESS and the grid will decide whether those cheap electrons are actually useful when they are needed.”

“That is perhaps the biggest lesson Sri Lanka should take from China and India’s energy transition right now,” he added.