Response to ‘Electricity is not Just Arithmetic, Sir”
The article by C. Maliyadda headlined ‘Electricity is not just arithmetic, Sir’ which appeared in last week’s Business Times has several errors; all of which I do not wish to dispute as the public are fully aware of the true picture.
I will only address a very glaring error, which if goes unchallenged could be added to the already large list of badly implemented plans.
His statement that renewable power need not be connected to the national grid is not only false but highly misleading too, especially when it comes from a former senior public servant.
Take the case of village micro or Pico hydro schemes. Who will give electricity to those unfortunate villagers, when the stream goes dry in some months of the year? That is why World Bank-funded RERED scheme ran into trouble as villagers felt they will never get the high quality and more reliable grid power as they will continue to be treated as second class citizens by providing less reliable and unsteady power(Kolambata kiri, apata kakiri).
It is also well known that when there are fewer consumers and a single generator, they experience massive voltage and frequency fluctuations in the system. In the national grid, those get smoothened through the large network due to the phenomena known as central limit theorem.
Similarly solar power is worse as a stand-alone system as it is generated during day time and used mostly during the night. This requires storage in the form of a battery bank. Those batteries are not only costly but also need frequent replacement due to deep discharge cycles unlike in auto mobiles. Batteries are also known to waste about 25 per cent of energy during the charging and discharging cycles.
That is why we always say such complex issues should not be decided by non-professionals irrespective of their holding high positions due to faulty administration system of the country.
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