Electric Refugees
The Norochcholai power plant at sunset.
The damnable power cuts. Colombo seems to have power, but Dehiwela doesn’t, right now. I’ve heard that parts of Nuwara Eliya haven’t had power for days. It’s a damn mess. We, for example, have to leave the home office and flee, throwing the entire morning’s work into disarray. I wonder if you can put a Rupee amount on productivity lost. It must be a lot.
The Rupee amount on keeping power going, however, must be higher. If it isn’t altogether impossible. The issue is that it hasn’t rained (driving hydropower) and the new coal power plant keeps breaking down, twelve times in the last 18 months. I’ve heard that the Chinese built plant was unsuitable for dealing with salty sea water and air, among other things. Even the power minister is saying that the plant has problems and should have been built different or somewhere else.
According to Champika Ranawaka’s interview in The Nation, he says they have to transport coal via barges because the water is too shallow for ships. He says Trinco would have been a better location. Honestly, Trinco would be a better location for a lot of things.
Though this plant keeps breaking down, it is still our only semi-long term solution. Past governments have just built, essentially, generators, running off fuel oil. These are hideously inefficient and expensive and yet they’ve been taking up the slack when it doesn’t rain. Without the buggy Norochcholai plant we’d have power cuts even worse, maybe all day.
So that’s why, but the what is that it still sucks. People don’t have power, which means businesses can’t run, which means people like me are not happy, at all.
Mohsin Hamid, author of How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, has a nice 
I’m happy to be featured in Echelon magazine’s 40 Under 40 feature, profiling young people who contribute to the economy in some way, mainly in business but also in terms of innovation and thought leadership. It’s an interesting article not just in that I’m in it (mainly for work on indi.ca and 
I won’t add too much commentary, but just read I guess. The youngest Rajapaksa, Rohitha (Chi Chi) has given an amazing interview to the 
In 2009 this strange character appeared on the Sri Lankan Internet scene, getting angry, flaming, trolling whatever. Then he started naming anonymous bloggers, posting comments as people’s kids, nasty stuff, for which I removed him from 
For your home office, you could use something like this: http://www.venceip.lk/index.php/venceip-productdetails/15 and keep working through the power cuts…
Problem with Trinco was the security issue. Now that issue has been solved.
But the Indian sampur plant is being delayed continuously (it was first planned in 2006). And Dr.Siyambalapitiya (not ranjith) has warned that this delay would lead to a power cut in 2016.
On the other hand i feel sorry for the current minister (ranavaka). Name he got from the environment minister as a efficient (comparatively) minister got ruined in the new job for (mostly) things out of his control.
The norochchole plant was built during the time of Jon Seneviratna (his sectary got caught in that drug/murder thing in kahavatta).
It would have been built much earlier if Bishop Marcus Fernando didn’t go off the deep end try to sabotage it along with his followers.
At that time it was financed by the Japanese.
here is a article written by Dr.Thilak Siyabalapitiya who was involved with the project.
http://sundaytimes.lk/110320/BusinessTimes/bt09.html
If I remember correctly, even Buddhist monks in the area joined the protests in support of the residents of the area, mainly fisherfolk who must have had some reasonable fears regarding the effect the power project would have on their lives. Most coastal fisherfolk are Catholics and they would’ve looked to the church for help.
However national neccessity must get priority, and the project went ahead as it rightly should. One hopes that the protests would have brought attention to issues that may otherwise have been ignored, and that it resulted in a cleaner project with minimal environmental impact.
Only, it looks like the true story is as Ranawaka said it, that proper standards were not maintained. Now that, is adding a lot of injury to the initial insult.
Buddhist monks and some organizations made a noise but they really did not have anything to worry about. They really don’t have much at stake here. Some made the claim that this could damage the Sri maha bodiya which is hundered of kilometers away from it. The real power was the bishop, environmentalists, fisherman and may be others who had something to do with the diesel power plants.
The residents in the area are Muslims or Catholics.
Out of these most affected were catholic fisherman so hence the church’s’ involvement.
Anyhow Dr.Siyabalapitiya estimates that the economic cost of the delay is somewhere between Rs.152 B(2004 fuel prices) and Rs.420 B (2011 fuel prices).
Considering the fat that oil was 40$ barrel in 2004, real cost would be on the higher side of the above estimate.
I remember reading about LED street lighting and solar power farms in Hambantota. Wonder whatever happened to them?
[...] these Hambantota developments could have been quite happily moved to Trincomallee. Think about it. The Power Minister is saying the Norochcholai power plant would have been better built there as the harbour is deep enough to [...]