ECONOMYNEXT – Sri Lanka’s three coal power plants which are overdue for major overhauls for two years are now running out of spare parts for routine maintenance due to forex shortages, putting them at risk of simultaneous shutdowns, engineers have warned.
Sri Lanka has three 300MW coal plants in the Lakvijaya complex in Puttalam, providing about 40 percent of the country’s energy needs running as baseload plants around the clock.
Unit 02 and Unit 03 scheduled maintenance is now delayed by two years and Unit 1 has to be overhauled now, maintenance engineers have warned CEB’s management.
If Unit 01 is also postponed for next year all three have to be overhauled in a single year as each Level A’ overhaul takes about 80 days.
But overhauls cannot be carried out on time due to a lack of foreign exchange for spares and also to pay for service contracts.
Cabinet approved contract and spare for Unit 02, ‘Level A’ maintenance is held up due to lack of foreign exchange.
There are 95 spare parts tenders pending. Some parts have to be specially manufactured. There were 7 service contracts pending from original equipment manufacturers.
Engineers say so far routine maintenance has been done, despite the delays in major overhauls.
But now foreign exchange is not available for spares for routine maintenance, sharply raising the risks of a coal plant breakdown.
About 12 million US dollars and 270,000 Euros were needed for spare parts 9.1 million dollars for service contracts.
Delays in opening letters of credit and placing orders have delayed spare part purchases, engineers said.
“If adequate spare parts are not received, there is no other option other than to shut down the machine,” engineers said, urging high priority to be placed on getting foreign exchange to prevent a collapse of the power sector.
Sri Lanka runs into frequent currency crises because intermediate regime central bank (flexible exchange rate or soft-peg) which every time economists print money to further their interventionism.
In recent years currency crises were triggered by money printed for flexible inflation targeting with a peg (2015/2016), output gap targeting with a peg (2018) and developmental state/production economy (2020/2021) with a soft-peg. (Colombo/Apr21/2022)
Hello. I came here 1981 first time and lived here permanent for the last 15 years and all the shit in this country has a name. Rajapakse 😬😬😬😬
This news just comes after they received a shipment of coal in the last few days. Why the engineers did not mention the status of the plants before in order to redirect the funds to the maintenance instead of paying for the coal. What is the use of spending so much to build a massive stockpile of coal when your plants are going to grind to halt