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Fuel or no fuel to power plants, CEB says power cuts will be order of the day
Two sides of a story: Small businesses struggle to survive with ongoing powercuts (left) while some establishments in Colombo city are lit up until late night. Pix by Nilan Maligaspe
Regardless of whether or not Sri Lanka obtains fuel for its power plants, the Ceylon Electricity Board will have to cause interruptions in future to regulate demand.
The President and numerous Ministers this week gave assurances that there will be no power interruptions after March 5. But the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) remained noncommittal.
“We can lessen the power outage if we receive the fuel on time, but we won’t be able to completely eliminate it,” CEB sources said. “The hydro reservoirs have been overworked as a result of the lack of fuel. We used the hydro-generators to compensate for the fuel scarcity. We won’t be able to recover the water that has been wasted whilst also managing electricity consumption.”
Meanwhile, reports of unequal power cuts sparked outrage. Some locations endured longer outages, many of which did not occur as scheduled, whilst others didn’t have any. The Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka (PUCSL) received a slew of complaints this week alleging that some areas, particularly Colombo 1-15, were exempted. It forced the regulator to direct the CEB to impose interruptions with immediate effect.
Residents of Colombo should refer to the timetable of areas P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, and W for the above-mentioned power interruptions, the PUCSL said, adding that Colombo city will now experience outages both in the morning and at night.
The regulator also wrote three letters to the General Manager of CEB regarding complaints electricity customers alleging that power cuts in their districts did not keep to the declared interruption schedule.
“The CEB has been asked to report the real times of disconnection and reconnection of all distribution feeders during the manual load shedding that took place from February 28 to March 3,” PUCSL Chairman Janaka Ratnayake said. The regulator has also instructed the licensee to carry out power shedding in a fair and equitable manner for all consumers, without discrimination or favoritism.
“We sent a team to the CEB to look into this matter, since we didn’t receive any response to the letters we sent in this regard,” he said. “When we observe the complaints, it is noticeable that half of the country is not facing power cuts.”
The PUCSL has directed the CEB to exempt only critical infrastructures such as hospitals from the scheduled power outages.
The CEB has said it will not disconnect power supply to water pumping stations, hospitals, high security zones and BOI investment zones. “Especially, in Colombo most of the areas are high security zones and they don’t have dedicated power lines,” sources said.
| Students in the dark, small businesses dying Small businesses are dying because they can’t decide when to function. It is leading to unhappy customers, said Suhail Shabeer, the owner of the small-scale eatery in Kalubowila named Toastpaan.“The little customer base we have is diminishing due to this situation. What is the solution for this matter? How is the Government going to support our businesses, by stealing more from us?” he questioned. Students and teachers who have been moved to online learning platforms due to COVID-19 have also been affected. “There is an eight-hour power cut in Jaffna and that is also not according to the schedule. We are suffering since we cannot conduct our daily activities, online education etc,” Balamayooran Arul, a student, said. | |
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