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Lighting or lightening the darkness

"The Power Crisis has taken a turn for the worse and it appears that we are going from the frying pan into the fire, "said IESL President, Eng. B.R.O. Fernando, reacting to the announcement that the duration of the power cut had been doubled.

Eng. Fernando was distressed that the decision-making process in the face of an acute, even grave, crisis has result in near rigor mortis. Inertia appears to have suddenly afflicted those who should be acting on behalf of solutions; particularly the commissioning of commencement exercises for the coal fired thermal power plant or even two plants to meet the rapidly expanding and growing needs of the country. If there is a major disincentive to investment in Sri Lanka today, it is the uncertainty surrounding the availability of power. Succinctly put, 'No power, no production, no exports, no income.'

Therefore, Eng. Fernando said, the seminar the IESL was presenting on Saturday, March 9 in Colombo on the theme: "The Crisis in the Power Sector" would be an eye-opener and spur the search for a viable and sustainable solution to the current national predicament.

Continuing, IESL President, Eng. B.R.O. Fernando said that Eng. Dr. Tilak Simbalapitiya would be speaking on the: "Importance of Timely Decisions on Generation Projects" which would hit the nail straight on the head because the present problem was a direct result of vacillation and procrastination on the part of the highest decision makers in the land. Then, he said, Dr. P.N. Fernando would speak on "The Build Own and Transfer (BOT) Power supply option that would examine the available alternatives that could be considered as viable options in current context. Finally, and appropriately enough, he said, Eng. Dr. Priyantha Wijetunge of the Moratuwa University would talk about "short Term Solutions to the Power Crisis," certainly, he said, this was the need of the hour in the face of a worsening crisis.

Eng. B.R.O. Fernando is not a person to mince his words. He said that few dishonest persons were giving the entire engineering fraternity bad reputation because of their opportunism and wheeling and dealing. This was much like Nero fiddling whilst Rome burned. As a senior engineer of long standing in the electrical sector he rejected the allegation that electrical engineers at the helm of the CEB were to blame, collectively, for the crisis, when decision-making was done at a higher level. He said that the engineers were a demoralized lot who had lost both their initiative and incentive to do anything because of the constant political interference that had gone on over the past few years.

The lack of appreciation in high places concerning the looming crisis has been going on since the Eighties and the Nineties. Today, the entire country is paying for the postponement of decisions that should have been taken when engineers forecast the coming power shortage then. Those forecasts were not pie-in-the-sky predictions but based on solid empirical evidence and the imperatives of demography. Engineers have always been hard-headed people used to dealing with unassailable facts - that's engineering, and it is unfortunate that anyone has to blame the entire profession for the selfish acts of a few dishonest people playing politics.

Concluding his interview, Eng. B.R.O. Fernando said that the Seminar should prove most illuminating and point the way out of the darkness affecting all of us.

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