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By K.C. Somaratna
I was very happy to see that two-page advertisement in Daily FT on the first ever PV Solar park at Hambantota commissioned to develop 10 MW and I could imagine how happy the Minister and State Minister would have been. Why I was so happy was that according to the graph given below taken from Long Term Generation Plan of the CEB for 2015-2034, this 10MW unit at Hambantota would give us at least 45000GW hrs of energy in one year – three times our annual electricity consumption.
I am sure Dr. Anura Wijepala, Chairman of CEB will vouch for the accuracy of my interpretation of this graph. Did all those politicians, advisers, technocrats, consultants who make pronouncements on various platforms about what percentage of Sri Lanka’s energy should be derived from Renewable Energy even care about what percentage of pages in the Long Term Generation Plan of CEB was devoted to their pet subject ‘Renewable Energy’ or about the accuracy of the figures provided in the report?
Counting the number of the pages is the simplest thing one could do and the more technically savvy ones could check the accuracy and if you haven’t even done that, your high level statements are worth nothing for the simple folk of this country and is only an unbearable cost for the country, leading to the droughts we face today and will be facing in the future.
Then there was this news item in the Lanka Pages that the State Minister had mentioned that we are heading for some power cuts and hydro reserves are much less this year. This was followed by a statement from the Minister of Disaster Management indicating how the drought has influenced agricultural production, need to import rice (food security), drought, unavailability of water (environment security) loss of hydropower (energy security) and all this contributing to an economic downturn. And I was thoroughly confused.
When the intelligentsia of this country including academia and corporation heads appear to be extremely relaxed and negligent in respect of these critical issues, what is the country we are going to be leaving behind for our grandchildren? If you don’t have them, it is ok.
This led to a series of thought processes in my mind starting with what happened on 3 December 2015. State Minister of Power and 
Energy had convened a session at the Parliamentary Complex to discuss the Long-term Generation Plan of the CEB, from which I had extracted the graph given above. The Secretary of Power and Energy and Dr. Thilak Siyambalapitiya joined the discussion later.
I believe, I was invited because when the Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka had a public discussion on 25 September 2015 on this Plan at the BMICH, I showed them the slide given below and said that Coal and Hydro power are not compatible partners in the generation of electricity in Sri Lanka and the actual cost of a unit of coal power would be about Rs. 30 per kWhr. I don’t think anybody took any notice of it. This cost was Rs. 86 per kWhr in 2014 and today that cost may have gone beyond Rs. 100 per kWhr.
During this public discussion I explained how Highway Solarisation could provide the electricity we need without any ill effects and how it could benefit both the economy and the environment as well. So at this 3 December discussion also, I told the State Minister what Highway Solarisation could do in way of generating PV Solar energy, how it could save millions of rupees as foreign exchange, how it would eliminate cracking of roadways, etc. and I believe he was convinced to a reasonable degree about this approach to power generation. Of course, only he could tell how far he had been convinced that day.
Then another renewable energy promoter walked into the room and after listening for a few minutes, he said, “Sir, I have a better plan” and explained how ‘Roof top solar panels’ would bring in greater benefits. One year has elapsed since then, and I don’t know how much of roof top solar power had been brought into stream. Although I had already done the comparisons between different solar energy options available at that time, I had not put it on paper and I thought I would prepare this table given as Figure 3.
It depicts a comparison of three possible approaches to obtaining PV solar energy to the electric grid. The comparison is in respect of 17 parameters and in respect of each parameter the rating of the particular option is given as 1 to 3 stars – 3 stars the best fit and 1 star the least. One could see that while Highway Solarisation has got 51 stars, Roof Top Solar gets 13 stars and Solar Park gets 11 stars only.
This diminished rating of Solar Park is primarily due to the deforestation involved in the process and contribution it makes towards droughts. How would deforestation contribute to droughts? As I mentioned in my previous articles additional concentration of CO2 increases the temperature and increased atmospheric temperature makes the atmosphere retain more water vapour without allowing it to fall. So to reduce droughts you need to have a mechanism to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere and probably the only natural way of doing it is through absorption by forestry to aid plant growth.
Plant growth through photosynthesis involves using about 8% solar radiation to make plants absorb CO2 and this absorption rate depends on the type of trees. Even the smaller plants and shrubs help in this process. Then this vegetation will reflect solar energy as ultra violet radiation and this could be as high as 25% for green grass. Furthermore these trees also lead to trans-evaporation to keep the atmosphere cool. When we eliminate vegetation, the water that will evaporate to reduce atmospheric temperature will be surface water leading to dry and cracked soil.
The water for trans-evaporation is basically brought up from the roots and put into the atmosphere through stomata in the leaves. Thus the outcome of deforestation will be that we eliminate the only avenue of reducing CO2 and create a much warmer environment, exactly what we experience today. All these aspects could be quantitatively expressed supported by references.
We have already commissioned two units of 10MW plants and two more such plants are in the construction phase. When environmental impacts of these units were carried out, it was spelt out that so many new acres of land has to be reforested as a mitigation action. Now that these two units are commissioned, we need to prescribe a period say one year within which the reforestation is to be completed and any new lands under construction should also be governed by the same regulation. But we should not pursue the construction of any more solar parks in the future.
One may wonder why we can’t do it in Sri Lanka while there are sizeable Solar Parks and Coal Power Plants in other parts of the world. The reason for this stems from the atmospheric circulation models given in figures 4 and 5. These two are taken from Frontiers of Climate Modeling by Professors T. Kiehl and V. Ramanathan, published by the Cambridge University Press. It was only last month Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Joint Programme on the Science and
Policy of Global Change published a note in Journal of Climate on how an MIT Team of Researchers has found out that predictions based on these large scale atmospheric circulation models yield much more accurate predictions on extreme weather conditions than more sophisticated climate models published recently. If one looks at these two sketches indicating the latitudinal circulation around 70N and longitudinal circulation around 80oE (Sri Lanka’s coordinates), one could see that this combination is a unique configuration. The latitudinal circulation around 70N goes up and towards 300N and comes down and back to 70N. This air going N will drop the moisture, but collect some CO2 from up to the surroundings of New Delhi and will come back.
As we eliminate forest cover in both countries around this route this enhancement of CO2 in the atmosphere will continue and this may explain the recent, continuing droughts and floods in Tamil Nadu. This rate of circulation is 120-150x109 kg/sec. If one looks at the Walker Circulation, one would see that the longitudinal circulation at our 800E location is about 0-10 x 109 kg/sec and thus there will be no circulation in that direction. This would prompt one to understand that Sri Lanka cannot be adopting those many possible alternative technologies to generate electricity being practiced elsewhere. So Sri Lanka is unique in this respect.
Sri Lanka can neither use anymore coal power plants nor anymore solar parks and the best option for Sri Lanka will be to use Highway Solarisation as much as possible. Its advantages are easily visible in the above given table. In fact I wrote to the President in March, 2015 and suggested that we establish Highway Solarisation projects to generate electricity and indicated the numerous advantages of the same. I was requested to make a presentation to a team of engineers from the Central Engineering Consultancy Bureau and Mahaweli Ministry and this was done.
But I understand that the Ministry of Mahaweli has decided to install Solar Parks on Mahaweli Land and establish Floating Solar units on the reservoirs. Recently it was mentioned in the media that the Government is interested in establishing a 100 MW Solar Park at Siyanbalanduwa which will probably deforest 450 acres for the purpose. The Government is also reported to be working towards a target of 32% forest cover for Sri Lanka. If deforestation is planned for this, the explanations given above would be adequate to indicate repercussions of such an effort as it would lead to more droughts, etc. All these explanations will indicate that given the unique position of Sri Lanka, Highway Solarisation is the Best Plan for using solar energy.
The President and Minister of Mahaweli as well as Environment and former Member of Parliament, representing Polonnaruwa district obviously would not like to see Mahaweli reservoirs running dry or his own voters and their grandchildren remembering him as having contributed to these future droughts. And then there may not be enough water to send to the north as expected from his pet project Moragahakanda multi-purpose project.
Now we can look at the Coal-Hydropower compatibility. We had been prompting about this since September, 2015 and it is sad that nobody took any notice of it. I have already mentioned how it happens and we, in this unique island called Sri Lanka could not be using any more coal power. It is the economic implication of Coal-Hydro incompatibility that I intend to address currently.
In the year 2016, we have produced 3462GWhrs of hydro energy with 1377 MW hydro capacity, whereas we have made 3632 Gwhrs and 4904 GWhrs in 2014 and 2015 respectively with the same capacity. On the other hand we have made 3202 GWhrs, 4443 GWhrs and 4977 GWhrs of electricity from coal during 2014, 2015 and 2016 respectively. Somebody might say that we have not been getting the same level of rainfall and therefore same level of hydro power even in the absence of coal power. Our hydro energy generation over the years in the past has been variable due to the two factors of (a) changing hydropower capacity and (b) the amount of rainfall received.
In order to adjust for hydropower capacity variations we have calculated the number of hours of hydropower generated by dividing the total hydro energy generated by the hydropower capacity available during the year and to adjust for year to year variability we have calculated the five-year moving average number of hours of hydro power generated calculated earlier. This five-year moving average has been decreasing for the last four years and crossed 3000 hour mark in 2016. Furthermore we have lost a significant portion of agri-production and the overall economic cost of this coal power to the nation is enormous. This is a cost we ignored either by design or default when we wrote those pages and pages of articles to justify the first coal power plant.
In fact, on 20 January 2015, Dr. Thilak Siyambalapitiya wrote that ‘a bold decision’ was taken by the country’s leadership to establish the coal power plant in 2005. When one is taking a decision for one’s own organisation, ‘Boldness’ may be an adequate aspect for the decision making. For example, in 2008 I made the Bold decision of compromising my consultancy work for doing research (desk-desearch) on climate change, energy security, etc. Our own President was concerned at that time when there were signs to the effect that even powerful countries would be compromising food security for the sake of energy security and the President boldly stressed that Sri Lanka would not compromise food security for the sake of energy security.
I could not see much positive signs of any solutions been developed for climate change. So I took that bold decision; but only I suffered as a result. But as a result of that ‘Bold’ decision made in 2005, in a sincere effort to ensure energy security without compromising food security, the totality of all the fundamental securities of Sri Lanka – energy (lower hydro), food (rice to be imported), economic (rice import, oil import, etc.) – had been compromised. The reason was that the decision was not ‘well informed’. It is left to the technocrats in different related establishments and the relevant consultants to provide that information to the decision makers.
At a time when the whole world was talking about greenhouse gas emissions the technocrats and consultants should have studied and provided a well-informed solution and not a solution completely rejected by almost all environment conscious countries in the world. This is more relevant for a small country like Sri Lanka experiencing the Hadley, Walker Circulations indicated above. The only other attraction that would have been there in the coal power plant may have been the possibility of starting a new trading company to handle the coal imports. This year 2005 is a very interesting, significant, change-over year for hydropower in Sri Lanka as during the six years ending in 2005, the average number of hours of generation of hydropower capacity has been varying consistently between 2277 and 2773 and never reached even 3,000 hours.
So we have seen (a) the incompatibility between Coal & Hydro, (b) Sri Lanka due to its location at this specific 70N, 810E location, cannot add more CO2 to the atmosphere without suffering more disastrous consequences. It is our intention to look at the options available. If we take all these pronouncements about percentages of renewable energy by 2030 and reduction of Greenhouse Gases as required per Paris Accord seriously, what we have done up to now seems to be counter-productive. So what we propose is a consolidated programme which will yield anticipated amounts of renewable energy as well as reduce the Greenhouse Gas Emissions as well.
What we need to remember is that if we keep on doing the things which we are doing now – keep on burning coal and emit more and more CO2 to get electricity, clearing vegetation in the name of renewable energy and thereby eliminate the only avenue of removing CO2 from the environment and increase oil driven transportation and emit more CO2 – we will not be able to achieve any of the above mentioned prudent and sacred objectives. It is for this reason that we need to look at alternative solutions to achieve both these objectives and what we propose – Highway Solarisation – has the potential towards achieving both the above mentioned objectives.
It could enhance the percentage of renewable energy in our energy mix while maintaining the CO2 levels at reasonable levels and ensuring that hydropower availability does not get depleted. This addresses the three most important issues to-day – namely (a) how would you generate energy without increasing CO2 level in the atmosphere in a set up where CO2 generated by a coal power plant has resulted in a drought of catastrophic dimensions (damage is considered to be beyond $ 1.5 billion),(b) significantly reduced hydro power and (c) thermal transportation forms the corner stone of a tourism industry which touched two million tourists in 2016 and gearing up to reach four million tourists in the near future.
Only way forward is Highway Solarisation implemented as fast as possible so that you are ready for end 2017 tourist season with a reasonable percentage of electricity for both the grid as well as battery electric vehicles which would form the backbone of tourist transportation. Obviously, can there be a more compatible partner for hydro than solar power or can there be a better place to lay those solar panels than the highways absorbing about 90% of solar energy falling on the same only to be reemitted as infra-red, long wave radiation to be absorbed by the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and reemitted leading to global warming and droughts and accompanying misery.
If this is not done, Sri Lanka could get into an extremely dangerous vicious circle, where coal energy and thermal transportation to meet the demands of enhanced tourism could drive hydro power to still lower levels and ultimately to a situation like in Chile to face wild fires. As I mentioned in my article to Daily FT on 12 August 2016, Chile is one of two countries where coal and hydro provide near 30% levels of electricity in the main grid. In Sri Lanka coal has already over taken hydro. Unfortunately in today’s context, the options available are limited to one – which is Highway Solarisation.
(The writer is Managing Director of Somaratna Consultants).
