The central government & their policies are responsible for most of the hardships we face today. But when it comes to implementing investments and projects in the renewable energy sector, surprisingly the central government has good policies and intent but have failed to implement them due to bureaucracy, corruption and personal agenda of few CEB officials.

The present problem is having too much capacity in the wrong types of power plants and too little in the right types. It’s an open secret that few of the CEB officials are not fond of utility scale renewable energy. They like non-renewable sources of energy but hate utility scale wind, solar and battery storage projects.

Despite renewable energy being clean and cheap, the utility scale RE projects have not been implemented in Sri Lanka on a large scale. Sri Lanka still has plenty of room for Solar and Wind. We only have around 12% of RE in the grid (excluding hydro). We are far from the critical limit that could possibly considerably impact the grid from the fluctuating nature of renewable sources.

CEB wants to convince people that the unreliable nature of RE is the reason why they oppose it. But the real reason is, they can’t maintain their infamous mafia power and pursue their personal agenda when there is an abundance of RE power in the system. The proposal of RE investors won’t get accepted even though the offered rate was lower.

While purchasing non-renewable energy power at a rate of over Rs.45 per unit, the CEB is blocking over 1,500 MW of new utility scale solar, wind and battery storage projects. Had these projects been approved by CEB and put to built in this year, they would be ready to supply electricity at the Rs.24 to 30 per kWh tariff within one and a half years’ time period, with lower than prevailing solar and wind energy tariffs and also far less than the cost of non-renewable electricity.

Few CEB Engineers suddenly come to realize that if the trend of implementing such utility scale re-projects continues in the country, this is going to be a threat to their business and their vested interests.

So, they have resorted to delaying tactics in the approval process of utility scale RE projects not favorable to them, effectively blocking large scale investments and investors who have plans to invest in the country.

On analysis, with the delay in these 1500 MW RE projects, the country will lose annually ~3200 GWh of clean and cheap energy resulting in the country’s economy spending additional Rs. 20 billion per year on account of the higher cost of non- renewable electricity.

It’s hard to fathom the unbelievable level of bureaucracy, corruption & personal agenda of CEB.