Remaking The Rubber Industry; Clean, Practical Solutions To Sri Lanka’s Energy Crisis – III
Dr. Chandre Dharmawardana
While the country remains mesmerized and partially paralyzed by the daily revelations of security lapses over a period of several years, the failure to carry out long-term policies on energy production, updating of agriculture and industry to keep pace with climate change, population growth etc., will cause irrevocable systemic collapse causing more prolonged misery than the short term shocks of Jihadists. Many of us, who have written articles pointing the way forward, since many decades, wonder if this all futile, or if there are still some capable groups, in the government or in the private sector, who will hear the message and seize the opportunity.
Surely, given that the biggest single expenditure faced by most nations is in meeting energy costs, and given that the availability of cheap energy is the single determining factor essential to all types of development, that is where the strongest effort of the government and the private entrepreneur should be. At a time when clean energies like solar energy and wind power were not competitive, it made sense for Sri Lanka to include coal power in its energy-mix. So the plans of the 1990s, if they had been carried out as planned, would have ensured that Sri Lanka today would not be facing a power crisis. In fact, it would have been ready to mothball the old technologies and rapidly move to new sustainable technologies.
Instead, the government has once again commissioned new coal-power plants in a knee-jerk reaction. This is a long-term commitment to highly polluting fossil-fuels energy already undercut by cheaper, cleaner alternatives that can be deployed more rapidly than coal plants. The annual import of coal to the Norochcholai (Horagolla) plant alone costs some 2.5 billion, and it will triple with the new plants. To compound the folly, the government continues in oil and gas explorations in the Palk Straits, not observing how weak but oil-rich countries have become enslaved by powerful nations that rob their oil using compliant puppet regimes who in turn keep the people under the jack boot. Furthermore, off-shore oil sources are environmentally far more damaging than land-based oil exploitation.
The Solar Industry Association of Sri Lanka alleges that the ‘Surya Bala Sangraamaya’ program, launched in 2016 is about to collapse. This is despite its great success with over 15,000-18,000 installations and a combined energy capacity of nearly 200-250 MW added to the national grid. This solar energy saves emissions of noxious nitric oxides, SO2 acid rain, toxic metal residues, and some 200,000 metric tonnes of CO2 per Annum. And yet, new legislation terminates the purchase of solar power from small rooftop producers, claiming that the CEB will “end up subsidizing” consumers of 60 units/month or less at Rs. 4.68 a unit. Surely, these consumers will necessarily consume more than 60 units before long. While failing to encourage solar energy, coal power and thermal stations that burn oil at great cost to the consumer and the environment are embraced.
Seeds produced by rubber trees go waste in most plantations.
Sri Lanka does NOT NEED fossil fuels of ANY SORT. In my first article in this series (Colombo Telegraph) I explained how, since 2009, I had advocated the installation of floating solar panel arrays located on hydro-electric reservoirs; the solar power generated is fed to the grid as needed or used to pump up water back into the reservoir. That is, solar power is stored as water head, and no storage batteries are needed. In fact, even pumping up the water can be dispensed with, by simply RETAINING the equivalent quantity of water instead of sending it down into the hydro-turbines. The presence of solar panels on the water saves some 30% of the evaporation by wind and sun. That is, the mere placing of the floating solar arrays on ten hydro-power reservoirs is equivalent to building some three new hydro-power reservoirs at only a comparatively negligible cost!
Wind power, installed around reservoirs can also be stored as water power, without the need for batteries, using the same concepts. The development of mini-hyropower should be highly discouraged as their environmental impact is much greater per Kwh produced.
The average life-cycle cost of solar energy production in Sri Lanka is of the order of 15-20 rupees per unit. Biomass energies can be much cheaper, and employ more people sustainably. While energy from bio-mass is not as clean as hydro-energy, the growth of biomass has a corrective effect on climate change, reduces the catastrophic decline in biodiversity, loss of pollinating insect species etc., by reducing habitat loss and increasing green space. The agriculture sector is on the whole in decline, partly due to unscientific meddling by politicians who have absorbed partial truths and common myths about the environment, or frightened into going back to so-called “Toxin-Free” traditional agriculture. Tea, Rubber, coconut or even a staple like paddy are not prospering.
