Sri Lanka is
building more mini-hydro and wind power plants but needs more technology transfer to ensure better use of renewable energy, officials said.Harsha Wickremasinghe, deputy director general of the Sustainable Energy Authority, said the country was well in its way to achieve planned non-conventional renewable energy targets but more ambitious goals needed greater caution.
"Our target is to deliver 10 percent of energy from non-conventional sources by 2015," Wickremasinghe told a news conference to announce a forthcoming conference on use of renewable energy for sustainable living.
The conference is organised by the German Alumni Association of Sri Lanka with the German Cultural Institute, German Academic Exchange Service and the SEA.
"It's a target we're comfortable with as we have already reached six percent," Wickremasinghe said.
"But there is tremendous pressure for us to increase the target to 20 percent."
He said the SEA was "working cautiously" towards achieving the higher target keeping in mind the difficulties encountered in exploiting non-conventional renewable sources of energy such as their fluctuating nature.
Energy produced from wind and solar plants varies depending on the availability of wind and sunlight and hence cannot be used as base load power.
"There are now 200 megawatts of small hydro power running and another 200MW are under construction," Wickremasinghe said.
The country's first commercial wind power plant began generating energy this year, he said.
Three wind power plants with a capacity of 10MW have been built in north-western Puttalam, a site considered ideal for wind power, and there are plans to build a total of 30MW of wind power plants.
"The wind power plants operated satisfactorily during the last monsoon," Wickremasinghe said.
"We hope to have more wind power plants not only in coastal areas but in other areas as well. We hope to develop more wind energy in Balangoda, (southeast of Colombo) and other windy areas," Wickremasinghe said.
The international renewable energy conference planned for November 26-28 is expected to draw about 120 participants from Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan and Germany, said Janaka Wijesundera, president of the German Alumni Association.
Wickremasinghe said Sri Lanka lacks knowledge in solar and wind power technologies and looked forward to technology transfer and sharing of knowledge through conferences like the one planned by the alumni association.
Germany has mature renewable energy technology and could help Sri Lanka to reduce harmful emissions from fossil fuel burning power plants, Wickremasinghe said "Partnerships like this and awareness raising during conferences like these are very valuable," he said.
"We're a growing economy. Our emissions will continue to rise and it is through partnerships like this that we can share knowledge."
It is the Policy that is lacking and not the technology. A good feed tariff is required for Solar like one for Wind.
ReplyDeleteMany countries are now having more than 30% of Grid Electricity from Renewable. Sri Lanka is blessed with so much of large hydro it can act as the storage energy required to take up the fluctuations. Large number of small distributed fluctuating renewable energy will produce more stable out put. Many countries in the world have generation with large percentage of renewables.
Germany is one of them and already has 20% coming from renewables consisting of 29,000MW of Wind and 15,000MW of Solar even with less than have of solar insolation compared to Sri Lanka.
Some 300,500 people in Germany were employed in the renewable energy sector in 2009, especially in small and medium sized companies.
It very encouraging to see such a Conference on use of renewable energy for sustainable living being being organised by the German Cultural Institute, German Academic Exchange Service.
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