Groping in the dark

Thursday 13th February, 2025

Sri Lanka continues to be in the throes of multiple crises because their root causes usually go unaddressed. If the past governments, especially the Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration, had cared to tackle the issue of the country’s national debt becoming unmanageable by taking steps to shore up foreign currency reserves and increasing state revenue substantially, the current economic crisis could have been averted.

A mega crisis has been developing in the power sector for decades, but nobody seems to care. Successive governments have only paid lip service to the pressing need to address it. Sunday’s countrywide power outage has left the government, the Opposition, the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) and other stakeholders behaving like the proverbial visually-impaired men who tried to figure out the shape of an elephant by touching different parts of the animal’s anatomy, and came to absurd conclusions. No sooner had the power failure occurred than Minister in charge of the power sector, Kumara Jayakody, declared that a monkey had done it! His claim had the whole world in stitches, with international media giving it much prominence owing to its high entertainment value. It also made one wonder whether Sri Lanka’s national grid was so primitive that it lacked resilience to withstand the shock from a monkey coming into contact with a transformer in a grid substation. Even ferocious Tigers could not shut down the national grid despite all their terror attacks on the country’s power infrastructure.

Senior CEB engineers lost no time in attributing Sunday’s power outage to an increase in solar power generation, which, they said, had rendered the national grid unstable on account of a drop in demand. That sounded a tall tale and betrayed the engineers’ prejudice against power generation from renewable sources. The CEB Technological Engineers Union has rubbished the engineers’ claim; it has said that according to a report prepared by a committee consisting of 35 experts including some of the serving CEB high-rankers, the national grid is capable of accommodating 2,600 MW of power from renewable sources, and solar power production amounts to only 1,400 MW at present. The CEB stands accused of short-changing the solar power producers in a bid to perpetuate the country’s overdependence on lucrative thermal power production. It will be interesting to see what the CEB engineers have to say about the aforesaid expert committee report.

There have been several previous instances where we experienced countrywide power outages that lasted for hours. During the past decade or so, every regime change has been followed by a nationwide power failure. The UNP-led UNF formed the Yahapalana government in 2015 after ousting the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration, and a countrywide blackout occurred in 2016. Grid defects were blamed for the eight-hour power outage, but no action was taken to find out what had really caused it.

The SLPP toppled the Yahapalana administration, and formed a government by winning the 2019 presidential election and the 2020 parliamentary polls; the country experienced a nationwide power failure in 2021. The issue was relegated to the limbo of forgotten things after the restoration of power supply and some half-hearted attempts to identify the causes thereof. Prolonged power cuts came thereafter for want of fuel to generate electricity.

Another countrywide power failure was experienced in 2023 about one year after the ouster of President Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe’s fortuitous elevation to the presidency. The latest nationwide power outage has come only a few months after a regime change.

Sunday’s power failure must be thoroughly probed and the causative factors identified as a national priority. It must also be ascertained whether some vested interests deliberately undermined the national grid to advance their own interests. Given the existence of various powerful lobbies, popularly known as Mafias, in Sri Lanka’s power sector, anything is possible.

The government should give serious thought to launching a clean-up of the power sector, which is rotten to the core, under its Clean Sri Lanka initiative.