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Tuesday, 10 April 2012

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New policy initiative required for energy efficiency

A new policy initiative is required to accelerate the implementation of energy efficiency measures, and a sustained campaign to assist and enforce it.

Energy Consultant Tilak Siyambalapitiya said at a symposium on "Facing Contemporary Development Challenges of Sri Lanka -Relevance of Dr E.F Schumacher's Work" at the Buddhist Cultural Centre Colombo last week. He said energy efficiency and demand management by end- users has seen many initiatives, but very limited impacts by way of benefits to customers and suppliers.

The appliance labeling program is at a slow pace, while hundreds of energy audits remain to be implemented, therefore having a new policy is vital.

He said, policies implemented are often unwritten policies. Therefore great efforts have to be taken to get politicians, administrators, and professionals to agree on policies, obtain their support and implement it.

Dr Siyambalapitiya said Sri Lanka?s primary energy mix draws 61 percent from renewable sources.

The policy on renewable energy development is to encourage replacement of fossil fuel use for thermal energy with biomass and to get a 10 percent contribution of renewable energy in the grid electricity supply, by year 2015.

However, the prices paid in Sri Lanka for renewable based electricity supplied to the grid are the highest in the world, whereas resources, investments, finance costs and contractual conditions are among the best in the world.

But due to serious policy failure renewable energy is most likely to benefit a selected few investors leaving the public with no benefits, he said.

Sri Lanka Energy Forum ,Executive Director Asoka Abeygunawardena said electricity demand in Sri Lanka has increased at a rate of 7 percent and the government target is to manage the demand as usual demand would increase by 10 percent by 2020.

Further, the country is planning to maintain a 40 percent share of renewable energy resources such as, biomass, wind, solar and ocean energy.

The government has also indicated its commitment to achieve carbon neutral growth in the power sector by 2020 and to follow carbon emissions reduction pathway after 2030.

However, if the government is to achieve this targets it is necessary to remove key technical and economical bottlenecks , he said. The key technical constraint is for the system to absorb power from most of the renewable energy sources due to their intermittent nature.

Therefore a storage mechanism is needed to address this issue and the government is seriously exploring the possibility of introducing pumped water storage power plants to Sri Lanka for removing this technical barrier.

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