Future With Solar Power; Covert Moves To Sell Norochcholai Plant
By Charitha Ratwatte -October 29, 2013
Charitha Ratwatte
With alternative energy sources improving their economic performance virtually by the day, combined with the USA accessing more and more domestic sources of crude oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing technology, the state of play in the power sector has undergone a revolutionary change.
South Asia’s power producers are faced with mammoth problems with galloping consumption of electricity. Conventional energy generation is in a mess in most South Asian countries, except Bhutan and Nepal, which have vast untapped hydro resources and low demand/consumption.
Importing coal, gas or oil is expensive; even in countries like India, which has coal resources, the State coal monopoly is unable to dig out enough coal to meet the demand. Coal has also to be imported. The domestic coal extracting industry is one horrendous mess of corruption.
Tycoons such as Kumar Mangalam Birla of the Adithiya Birla Group and Naveen Jindal of Jindal Steel and Power have got embroiled in corruption litigation, causing panic among Indian tycoons. As a result, brown outs and black outs are the norm; consumers rely on highly polluting diesel. India has found some oil and gas in the Cauvery Basin, but not as much as expected.
On the Sri Lanka side of the border in the Palk Strait, the Mannar Basin, two gas discoveries have been made by Cairn India. There is an issue as to whether these are commercially viable quantities. The price at which it can be extracted and sold has not been worked out. It is said that it would be a floating price negotiated depending on the cost of production and the benefit of import substitution to the CEB.
A Kind Note To The Institute Of Engineers Sri Lanka (IESL)
Dr. Thrishantha Nanayakkara
I was very happy to see that IESL has started to organize a National Engineering Conference. We did not have this kind of conferences when we were Engineering students in Sri Lanka. Later when we were known among fellow engineers in other countries, we started to organize an annual conference in Sri Lanka that attracts on average researchers from 18 countries to Sri Lanka to present their findings in technology for sustainable development. Through that experience I know the impact of this kind of conferences held in Sri Lanka on the lives of local engineers and students.
There is no doubt that IESL senior members may know that a technical conference has a formal structure. It has sessions on different themes, and it has plenary talks and keynote talks given by prominent scientists/engineers in the field. For instance, I refer the reader to keynote speeches in several annual conferences held in Sri Lanka such as The International Conference on Industrial and Automation Systemsand International Conference on Building Resilience. One may see that the keynote speakers are prominent researchers or professionals in the specific field.
Apart from technical conferences, Sri Lanka has had a long culture of recognizing the engineers behind National projects like giving engineer Wimalasurendra’s name to the power station he gave leadership to, and naming numerous roads in Colombo after the respective Engineers who built them even in the Colonial times.
I am sure IESL is aware of the reason as to why we do not get politically sensitive guests involved in technical roles in conferences. We avoid that because the whole purpose of the conference is to bring together people with diverse political, ethnic, and religious backgrounds to focus on a given set of technical topics without unnecessary distractions. Sri Lanka is not without major recent projects if you wanted keynote speakers with a local relevance. How about the chief engineer of Hambantota harbor project, Norichcholai power station project, the Southern Highway project, or even the design engineer of Sri Lanka’s first satellite? They may well be Chinese Engineers. But it does not matter as long as he/she could share some technical experience with local engineers. Was there a major reason to skip all those opportunities to get the defense secretary to do this key technical job? If you really wanted to honor him, you could have given him a guest of honor speech, which is not technical. You cannot avoid young members shying away from IESL if they begin to feel that their professional body is getting politicized. I do not want IESL to face that disaster. Therefore, I urge all IESL members to take this issue up in the next general meeting to avoid future disappointments.
