Saturday, April 14, 2012

Energy expert says costly renewable energy is myth

By Ifham Nizam

An energy expert says the major non-technical constraint, when it comes to the power sector, is the widespread myth that renewable energy is expensive.

However, the government had taken a number of initiatives to promote the use of renewable energy sources, he said.

Power and Energy Ministry Senior Consultant Ashoka Abeywardena, speaking at an energy forum recently to commemorate the 100th birth anniversary of the well known economist Fitz Schumacher, said that based on Schumacher’s principles it could be proved that both renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies are economically more feasible than their fossil fuel counterparts.

He said that the electricity demand in Sri Lanka had been increasing at a rate of seven per cent per annum and the government’s target was to manage it at that level than to allow a business-as-usual demand increase of 10 per cent by 2020.

The country was planning to maintain a 40 per cent share of renewable energy in Sri Lanka until 2020 by tapping non-conventional renewable energy resources such as biomass, wind, solar and ocean energy, the expert maintained.

Abeywardena also said that the government had indicated its commitment to achieve carbon neutral growth in the power sector by 2020 and to follow a carbon emission reduction pathway after 2030.

"If the government is to achieve these targets then it is necessary to remove key technical and economical bottlenecks. The key technical constraint is for the system to absorb power from most of the renewable energy sources due to their intermittent nature," he stressed.

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

http://www.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=49532

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