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| Wednesday, 21 April 2004 |
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Home-grown electricity Ground realities by Tharuka Dissanaike Ceylon Electricity Board's dire warning of possible power cuts after the New Year is still ringing in our ears. The heat is bad enough, but imagine going without electricity for long hours on top of that. If the rain gods oblige, we may still wriggle our way out of yet another power crisis. Barely. Tragic, but our country yet has to look upon the skies to deliver much-needed energy. Developing our own water resources to provide electricity was a wonderful decision. It provided the country with low-cost, donor-funded hydro projects that met our requirements for electric power for many decades. But in the long-term, this exercise has proved to be ineffective- pulling the consumer into a vortex of spiralling prices and unreliable supply. When reservoirs run dry and supply dips, our energy managers gleefully commission 'emergency power' at a huge cost. Long-term plans for improving supply are all based on adding more thermal power plants that will guzzle imported coal or oil. There appears to be no real respite for the public in terms of electricity costs and reliability. It is good news, therefore, to know that electricity DOES grow on trees. I believe most people by now know of or have heard of dendro thermal power, which literally means power from trees. The idea is to generate thermal power using wood from fast growing trees instead of oil or coal. Timber, oil and coal are different fuels used to produce a similar end result - heat. In the thermal power plants operated in our country today, oil is burnt to produce steam, which turns a turbine. The proposed coal power plant will use coal to achieve this end at a considerably lower cost than oil. In dendro, oil and coal are substituted by fuel wood. The timber is not harvested from existing forests, but will be grown in an organized and sustainable manner, hopefully in abandoned lands and degraded slopes that are legacy of bad agricultural practices. Dendro plants can be run as small rural enterprises or as large power plants the USA has dendro thermal plants, which can produce up to 50 Mw of power. But the best thing about dendro is that addresses three of the country's most pertinent issues simultaneously (the new government please note). Those are the energy crisis, unemployment and increased forest/ tree cover. Although at the outset dendro sounds like a polluting way of producing electricity, the net carbon dioxide emission is nullified by growing trees for fuel wood. The very exercise depends on constantly replenishing the tree cover and this is the best way to take out carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere. Scientists have found that young, fast growing trees absorb a lot more of this gas than do established forests. So a dendro plantation with its leafy, speedily growing trees will absorb the carbon dioxide generated in the furnaces of the power plants and maybe much more. As for employment, researchers estimate that at least 100,000 families can find their daily bread (and butter) by growing fuel wood plantations to supply dendro power plants. Power thus generated will come to the consumer at a considerably lower cost than imported coal-oil based thermal power. This will be a relief to the consumer and a great saving on foreign exchange spent today on shipping fuel. It is estimated that if 20% of the country's power requirement were met through fuel wood plantations, we would be saving to the tune of Rs. 15 billion every year. Also, dendro technology is simple, proven and immediately adaptable. Another plus point is that dendro plantations can utilize presently abandoned lands (fallow chenas or tea lands) thus maximizing the use of land in a country that is already squeezed up for space. |
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