Kudos to President who made the country’s ‘coal power plant dream’ come true. The President has also said that the country would get uninterrupted power soon. Good signs.
The Norachcholai plant is 20 years overdue, still, it looks like if not for the President the plant would not have planted itself at one place firmly.
The project had been touring all around the country before finally settling at Norachcholai in 2006. The project had been a political hot potato, with successive governments shelving and shifting the project due to political pressure over the ‘best site.’ Some say the diesel mafia was behind the non-implementation of a mega power project for so long. The Norachcholai project is about two decades overdue, stalled repeatedly by political opposition to the project and environmentalist groups.
The power plant will give the country’s strained power grid a boost, with a critical need for a large base-load power plant to meet growing electricity needs.
Also we need to remember that Sri Lanka has the highest energy costs in the region. And there are many girls in the beach too they say, when it comes to development activities and foreign direct investments.
The country’s daily electricity demand is estimated at 25 million units and grows at eight per cent each year, according to a CEB report published earlier. The country however needs three 300MW plants over 15 years to keep up with projected electricity demand, according to CEB’s Generation Planning Report.
Heavy dependence on thermal power has taken costs of production to over Rs. 10 a unit. The government claims the coal plant would reduce electricity charges by as much as 13 per cent.
However, the project had other problems in addition to its ‘touring’ nature.
In addition to the Talawila shrine and cultivation in the Kalpitiya area as well as prawn farming and the salterns at Palavi, heavy South-West monsoon winds are feared capable of carrying the unrecovered ‘fly-ash’ as far as Anuradhapura and Trincomalee according to some.
The coal plant would need to burn 2,640 tons of coal and would produce over 175 tons of ‘fly-ash’ every day. Even if 99 per cent of the fly ash is recovered, around two tons of it will be blown inland continuously and would be carried as far as Anuradhapura and Trincomalee, environmentalists claim.
Meanwhile the families, who gave up their lands for the coal power plant project, had complained the authorities had deceived them by providing them with badly built alternative houses. The government took over 300 acres at Narakkaliya and Paniadiya areas and 68 families who lived there had been given houses in the Daluwa Manpuriya Nirmalapura housing scheme.
Problems apart, the fact is, the benefits of the new plant outweigh the perceived damages as claimed by environmentalists, given the context.
Environmentalists could be correct but we have to make difficult choices. And we have to wait and see how many of the claims come true.
The 300 megawatt plant as well as supporting infrastructure is entirely funded by the Chinese government. Supporting infrastructure will include cargo and coal handling facilities as well as a 115 kilometre transmission line. The delay of the power plant shows a fundamental problem in a democracy…the need for a strong and stable leadership.
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