19 Dec 2008 bibekpaudel   » (Apprentice)

More Darkness


Load-shedding has been an unmistakable feature of daily lives in Nepal. People plan their days accordingly. They sleep and wake up accordingly. Businesses and office-goers, professionals try to adjust their work and daily routine in harmony with the load-shedding schedule published by the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA, aptly called No Electricity Authority of Nepal). NEA is very good at doing it. It changes its schedule and duration time and again, citing different reasons. In summers, its usually because of the flooding at certain rivers that grains and rock try to disturb the hydro-power plants. In winters, its because most rivers originating in the mountains decrease in their volumes because the snow melts less. At other times, its because one or the other power plant needs to be closed because of technical difficulties. At no points do we learn about measures taken to forestall annual occurrences of such events.

Effective from today, NEA has imposed, another schedule. There will be 70 hours of power cut every week. That is 10 hours a day. NEA says that, come mid-January, the duration will be increased. Imagine how lives will move. Industries have already declared that it’d be impossible for them to sustain. Of course, people trading generators, inverters and such like will be very happy, like some others who’d have waited for such days.

The current government has declared its policy of generating 10,000 MW of power in 10 years, while no attempts have been made to control the 25.15 percent power (of total power capacity) lost by NEA due to power leakage.

In April, I wrote:

… Each day, Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) imposes an eight-hour long load-shedding. I am sure they impose many other hours of unannounced power cuts. This, in a country whose power potential is roughly 83,000 MW, which is equivalent to the combined installed hydroelectricity capacity of Canada, the United States and Mexico (reference), although less than 1 percent has been developed (reference). Inflation is on the rise, making the livelihood of ordinary citizens extremely difficult; exports are hitting their all-time low and so are stock prices. Major industries have been shut down and due to a long time of bad publicity, tourism is only slowly gaining its lost pace…

      

Syndicated 2008-12-19 06:59:09 from Bibek Paudel's weblog

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