Referring to the ‘Sunday Island’ news story Rantambe reservoir drain cost CEB whopping Rs. 700 mn published on September 11, 2011, the CEB says on the request of Mahaweli Authority of Sri Lanka for an inspection of the Rantambe regulating pond below the level power plant could operate, Water Management Secretariat has accordingly arranged lowering the pond on 02nd September 2011 when irrigation water releases for Yala season concluded. This has been necessitated due to project work carried out by "Dam Safety Water Recourses Planning Project" on the Mahaweli Authority to assertion dam safety issues. It is prudent to plan and carry out such works when the inflow to Rantambe pond is minimal and also when there is no irrigation requirement.
Rantambe power station staff has also requested to inspect the extensive repair works carried out to intake screen three years ago, which could only be inspected when the pond is emptied. Therefore both activities have been carried out on 2nd September.
It is to be noted that water through bottom outlet is released only when water level at which power plant are not capable of generating further. This level is recorded as 144.27m. The corresponding storage at this level was only around 1.7 mcm which correspond to around 0.14 GWh. It is to be noted that energy that could be generated with full active (total) capacity of water is about 0.5 GWh. The water released for inspection works was only the water below the minimum operating level.
Hence the ‘Sunday Island’ report highlighting the amount of Energy as 14 GWh is around 100 times more than actual figure, which is factually incorrect and misleading.
Our reporter adds:
The reply by CEB confirms that water was released from the Rantembe Reservoir. The question is what prompted this "routine inspection." Certainly, there had been no emergency situation that posed an imminent danger to the dam or any other civil structure of the reservoir.
Both the CEB and Mahaweli Authority could not have picked a worse time for reservoir inspection, even under normal conditions. They should know that Randenigala/Rantembe will not receive water until the monsoons set in towards the end of October. This inspection should have been postponed at least until the rains started so that the reservoir would fill up quickly, causing minimum disruption to power generation at Randenigala. Given the serious situation in the hydro power generation, CEB should have preserved the water available at all costs.
It defies commons sense why this inspection was allowed in the first place, in the absence of a dire emergency. If this was a ‘routine inspection’ as claimed by CEB, then that event should have been incorporated in the power generation schedules agreed among relevant authorities, in the same way routine maintenance of power plant is included.
As for the quantity of water released, there is no record to prove that the water level of the reservoir had reached the so-called critical level. Once the reservoir is emptied, one cannot possibly know how much of that water could have been used for power generation.
If this was a planned event, then the power plant staff would have made sure that all the water that could have used for energy productions would have been used before Mahaweli Authority was allowed to open the bottom outlets.
Our sources at CEB and Mahaweli Authority have informed us that there was sufficient water to generate approximately 15 million units of electricity as we reported earlier. CEB now disputed this figure and says the water released could have generated only 0.5 million units.
However, when we asked the CEB Chairman before publishing our story, he was not even aware that the reservoir had been emptied, let alone how much water was released. We stand by our report, as we have not seen any evidence to contradict the figures we published.
http://www.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=35407
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