Impediments to a better CEB

by Kumar David

It is a shame that CEB Chairman Vijitha Herath was happy to sell his professionals down the river for cheap popularity with his political bosses as in his interview in Ceylon Today (23 August, pA4). The sub-heading was “Corrupt Power Deals by last regime – CEB Chairman” and the opening summary statement by the interviewer reads “The power and energy sector in Sri Lanka, mainly the Ceylon Electricity Board is alleged to be one of the most corrupt and most negligent entities in the country. In the past even the state sector worked with the power sector in the most lackadaisical manner – cancelling competitive tenders and at the same time awarding them to those who curry favour with higher ups or private suppliers based on deals. There are accusations that CEB Engineers run a monopoly”. To my knowledge Mr Herath has issued no refutation disassociating himself from the interviewer’s implied attribution of views, nor has he rejected the association of his name and office from grossly untruthful slanders of his staff. Is this the man who is going to give leadership to the CEB? Does he not know that corruption in the power sector derives 90% from Presidents, the Cabinet, Power Ministers and Ministry Secretaries? Big time corruption in the power sector commenced in the 1990s in Chandrika’s time with the awarding of contracts to build and operate private power plants. Big money went to big players. Do they not teach corporate managers like Mr Herath about reciprocal confidence building? Managers who undermine and untruthfully publicly ridicule their staff will lose the trust of colleagues and the confidence of the institution.

In the mean time we have had this eight-hour all-Island blackout and an inability to restore full supplies for four or five days. One matter I want to especially complain about is the failure of the CEB or CEB-Ministry (erroneously named Power-Ministry) to issue a full, frank and transparent public statement. I appreciate detailed technical analyses will take time and highly placed fools who allege sabotage are doing damage. However, a simple summary would have sufficed to keep speculation at bay. Speculation on the grapevine says that a bus-bar was inadvertently energised by maintenance crew before a heavy earthing chain was removed which led to massive tripping of other circuits and the isolation of Norochcholai. After that it took ages to restart Norochcholai, a known problem which seems not to have been sorted out for 12 years.

Furthermore, there was something new that has not been encountered before. When units were brought back on-line and attempts made, in many different ways, to re-energise Colombo, the system repeatedly tripped. Is all this true? No official statement! Questions: (a) Three-phase to ground flashovers are not common but not unknown; systems should be robust to such events. (b) Why has something not been done for a decade about Norochcholai restarting? And (c) Repetitive tripping-on-re-energisation is a new phenomenon that CEB professionals can sort out given time. However, there has to be stringent outside review of their analyses and proposed solutions. Ministers who smell a saboteur-rat under every bed and Chairmen who undercut their staff will be of no help.

Renewable Energy

Renewable energy sourced technologies for the generation of electricity is one of the very best things that has happened to humanity. The problem is that the God Indira who commands the sun and wind was not equally generous to all corners of the earth. A one square kilometre site atop the Atacama Desert in Chile or Hardup in the Namib Dessert will produce about 350 GWh (gigawatt hours) and 230 GWh respectively per year. The output for a one square kilometre site in Puttalam, NCP, NP or Hambabtota will be about 150 GWh per year. [A GWh is 1,000,000 units or kWh]. A 1000MW coal power station will generate about 6300 GWh per year (Norochcholai is 900MW and extension to 1200 is planned). To match this, we will need 42 square kilometres of land, that is close to 10,000 acres! This is the problem! Only countries with large dessert landmasses can think big about solar powered electricity. Uninhabited and uncultivated portions NCP, NWP, NP and Hambantota District are good locations for big solar farms, but all together it will not be easy to put together more than about half-a-Norochcholai. As with big-hydro, with wind and solar too, once the best sites are used up it’s saturation; what after that? With other technologies (thermal, nuclear and future fusion power) new plant can be added without such restrictions.

An attraction of solar power is that prices are coming down steeply. After you factor in lifetime repayment of capital, the future cost of electricity generated from large solar farms will be about Rs 10 per kWh while coal or LNG cost between Rs 7 and Rs 9 depending on global coal and gas prices. Let us agree, prices are comparable. The CEB buys privately generated (IPP or Independent Power Producer) power, when it faces shortage, at about Rs 25 per kWh, again variable with world oil prices. [I won’t waste your time with fractions and decimals which will be out of date between one month and the next. When someone with a little subject knowledge writes media columns the duty is to convey useful and reliable information, not to impress readers with minutiae].

We are in our present predicament because of the stupidity and inanity, respectively, of President Sirisena and PM Ranil who ignored an Expert Committee Report in 2016 which warned that cancelling Sampur coal-fired power station would be ruinous. They had numerous warnings from other experts and CEB planners as well. As a member of the Committee I estimated, and included in the Report, that this blunder would cost the country Rs 220 billion. That now seems a bit of an underestimate and the crisis has arrived sooner than I forecast. I am not playing the usual “this regime”, “that regime” game that the media, corporate chairmen and politician are slick at. The two former Rajapaksa Administrations and the 2015-2019 government have all been grossly imprudent in respect of the long and short-term future of the country’s electricity sector. That’s that and QED!

I will not repeat the same story about wind generated electricity though I have jotted down some back of the envelope calculations for my own use. The scenario is similar to solar: It is, like solar, much less polluting and it is price comparable with coal or LNG and much less pricey (only capital costs, negligible running cost) than oil-fired private power. But availability of good sites is limited as with solar (once the best sites are used up as with major hydro, the story is finished – what to do after that?). A very important point is that renewables are big in the public popularity stakes and this is the great selling point for politicians who don’t know the difference between a kilowatt-hour and an LED lamp.

As per the most up to date information on the CEB website (2017) large-hydro supplied 24.6% of total energy while wind, mini-hydro and solar supplied 8.1% – of which mini-hydro was 5.2% all the others 3.9%. CEB thermal (coal and oil) was 52.2% and IPPs (all oil) 15.2% of energy. (It fluctuates a little annually depending on rainfall and unforeseen events like the August 2020 system outage). However, one needs to be ignorant of the basic laws of physics and not schooled in primary arithmetic to say that renewable source electricity will supply 80% of energy by 2030. If in 10 to 15 years demand doubles (say) and no large-hydro is added (only few medium-size projects are left to do) then its relative share will decline, as per trivial arithmetic, to 12.3%. To increase non large-hydro renewables (only 3.9% now) by a factor of five to 19.5%, energy supply must increase, as per trivial arithmetic again, tenfold within 10 years! Only knaves and politicians make such promises.

Has government (President/PM/Cabinet/Subject Ministry) corruption and incompetence been an obstacle to the faster implementation of renewable energy sourced electricity? When competent, rational and honest decision making about the country’s long-term generation expansion programme is undermined by government (all governments) it throws a spanner in the works. Government after government have been ‘playing pandu’; to-LNG or not-to-LNG; to have another coal fired unit or not; to embrace India or Japan or both. When mega private sector companies screw ministers and when nothing is decided properly, it throws the transmission plans out of kilter and demoralises planners. It stands funding including for renewable sources on its head. Therefore, in addition to the technical limitations that I discussed previously cock-up and corruption at the highest levels – not in the CEB Mr Herath but in governments – is an impediment to a sensible programme for increasing renewable source power generation.