Opinion (Spotlight Weekly)

Electricity Planners At Fault

By AB Thapa

Any future plan must be based as far as possible on the experience gained in the past. This has been the practice everywhere in the world. Unfortunately in Nepal we are very insensitive to realization that our planning must take full advantage of our own past experience and should be supported by relevant studies carried out at home and also in other countries.

Donors have been very generous to Nepal in helping us to implement various types of projects. They have also spent a huge sum of money to carry out studies which are presented in innumerable volumes of reports submitted to our government. Nobody is seen taking interest to read carefully such reports in display in various government libraries. Even those reports that are highly valuable for our present national plan gather dust in the shelves of the libraries of the government departments. At present our electricity sector is in complete disarray because we never cared to look behind and draw lessons from the findings of our own past studies. An interesting case to be presented here could be the Kulekhani-3 episode because a final decision to implement this project is yet to be made. The way the JICA study ( 1988 ) of the Kulekhani-3 project, proposed to be developed to accrue primarily capacity benefit, threw all of us into total confusion shows that none of us have seriously read the economic analysis contained in the feasibility study reports of the major projects such as the Karnali Chisapani, Pancheshwor, Sapta-Gandaki etc.

Kulekhani Power Development

It is said that the hydroelectric power development potential of the Kulekhani river was for the first time explored by the Swiss-Nepal Team in 1956. It was initially planned to effect the simple diversion of the Kulekhani river into the Rapti to utilize the enormous difference in elevations between the two rivers to build a high head power station. At that time storage dam was not considered. A technical team dispatched by the Government of Japan in 1963 carried out a more comprehensive study and prepared a preliminary design report.

In 1974, the feasibility study of the Kulekhani hydroelectric power projects was completed under the JICA assistance. The study report recommended to take up for implementation the Kulekhani-1 hydropower project. The construction of the Kulekhani-1 project was completed in 1982 within the time stipulated in the feasibility report. The project comprises of a 107 meters high rock fill dam, a reservoir with an effective storage volume of 73.3 million cm. on the Kulekhani river, and a power station with an installed capacity of 60 MW on the Rapti river operating at a water head of over 600 meters. The study of the Kulekhani-2 hydropower project was carried out side by side with the construction of the Kulekhani No-1 project. The regulated flow of the Kulekhani river is directly drawn into the headrace tunnel of the Kulekhani-2 project from the tailrace of the Kulekhani-1 power station. The natural flow of the Mandu river, a tributary of the Rapti, is also drawn into headrace tunnel of Kulekhani-2 project. The installed capacity of the Kulekhani-2 power station operating at a head of over 300 meters is 32 MW. The construction of the Kulekhani-2 power project was completed in 1986.

The feasibility study of the Kulekhani-3 hydropower project was completed in May, 1988 as the last project in the integrated development of the Kulekhani hydropower system. Very recently Water Energy Commission has put forward a new proposal to divert the Langtang, Melamchi, Yangri, Larke and Balephi rivers through Kathmandu valley into the Kulakhani storage reservoir for power generation. Such diversion would allow the Kulekhani hydropower projects to operate in full capacity throughout the year. However, it would be necessary to build a new hydropower project running in parallel to the existing Kulekhani- 1 & 2 hydro power projects to fully utilize the stored water in the Kulekhani reservoir in excess to the requirements of the existing Kulekhani hydropower plants. A single hydropower station operating at a head over 1000 meters directly drawing water from the Kulekhani storage reservoir and discharging into the Rapti near Bhainse could be built. The total length of the tunnel of this project would be about 13 kilometers. The small reregulation reservoir of the Kulekhani-3 project could be used to cushion the abruptly varying high discharges from the power houses against river bed erosions if the total installed capacity of the Kulekhani system power stations is significantly raised to cover extreme peak loads. The proposed diversion of the northern rivers into the Kulekhani system is also linked with the plan to augment the water availability in the Kathmandu valley.

Kulekhani-3 Power Project

The feasibility study of the Kulekhani-3 Project had been carried out under the JICA assistance. Few findings of that study is presented hereinafter. The power supply situation had greatly worsened, as a result the NEA started the load shedding in whole country including Kathmandu city from November 1st 1992. The duration of the power shedding was 2 hours on the peak load every day. Additional countermeasures were required to avoid the continuance of power shedding because there was a huge gap between the power supply capacity and the expected high growth of demand, particularly during the peak load time in dry season, from November to March. Despite the huge potential for hydropower development in Nepal, there were limited possibilities for the urgent development. Most of the identified projects were not yet fully ready to go into construction any time soon. In addition, many of them were planned as the run-of-river type without the provision of daily storage facility. Such projects could not fulfill our requirements to meet the demand for the peak load.

The diesel powered or gas turbine plants are suitable for the supply of electricity to meet the peaking demand, however, the NEA hesitated to build such thermal power plants with big installed capacity. The Kulekhani-3 Hydropower Project with an installed capacity of 50 MW ( it could go up to 75 MW if the peaking period is only 2 hours) was certainly the most appropriate project in every respect. The feasibility study was already completed in 1988. The project planned as an extreme peaking power station to generate electric power exclusively in evening time lasting 3 hours or even less in dry season utilizing the existing Kulekhani reservoir storage with an effective capacity of 73.3 million cm perfectly matched against the NEA's need for generation expansion.

Those of us involved in planning have often felt that in our country it is rather easy to identify a good hydropower project suitable to generate electricity to meet the base load demand. On the contrary, the peaking power supply particularly in dry season is the most critical problem and thus this issue needs to be very carefully addressed in taking decision to select such hydropower projects. It hardly needs to be explained that it would always be far economical to use the unutilized existing capacity that would be available free of cost rather than to provide a new one. It implies that in case of the Kulekhani system we should try to make maximum usage of the existing reservoir storage that would allow us to generate electricity during the critical dry months when the demand for the electricity is the highest. The Kulekhani-3 Hydropower project has clear advantage over all other similar projects and thus it was found at that time to be the most suitable project to meet the peak power shortage.

NEA's Faulty Perception

The recommendation made by the JICA team to implement the Kulekhani-3 hydropower station with an installed capacity of 50 MW was absolutely correct. At that time in our national grid the shortfall in capacity was over 20% whereas the shortfall in energy was merely around 2%. A brief study carried out in the Water Energy Commission had recommended to increase the capacity of the Kulekhani-3 hydropower even up to 75 MW because at that time the duration of the load shedding was only 2 hours and the economic benefit would have been much higher by comparison with the 50 MW alternative. The 75 MW or 50 MW Kulekhani-3 projects would be having very high capacity benefit but the energy benefit is not significant. Unfortunately the idea of capacity benefit came as a total surprise to the NEA. The NEA regarded that the capacity benefit is something fictitious and thus it could be ignored. So they went completely against the proposal of the JICA study team, as a result it was decided at that time not to implement the Kulekhani-3 project. However, they are now seen lured by the 13 MW capacity Kulekhani-3 project operating in tandem with the Kulekhani- 1&2 power stations that has somewhat higher energy benefit despite the fact that the capacity benefit of this alternative is quite low.

Lack of understanding of power engineering economics could have grave consequences for the sustainability of the NEA. At present the NEA is running into great surpluses of the seasonal energy which is now almost completely wasted. Hydropower projects built in NEA's choice have to be operated continuously round the clock like the coal based thermal power stations despite the fact that the country could offer any number of more suitable hydropower projects. All troubles of the NEA emanate from the facts that responsible person in NEA are quite unaware of the power engineering economics problems and thus they easily fall victim to cunning foreign hydropower developers entering into Nepal to become quickly very rich. Let us analyze the significance of the capacity benefit in global context that indeed would be equally applicable in he context of our country also.

Dependable Capacity Benefits

Providing a source of dependable peaking capacity is one of the basic objectives and accomplishments of hydropower stations like the Kulekhani-3 ( 50 to 75 MW in capacity) or pumped storage plants. By providing a dependable source of capacity during peak power demand periods, the reliability of the power supply system is increased.

At present pump storage plants are being built everywhere in the world including India. Needless to say that such pump storage plants are built because they are highly feasible. The pump storage plants are built to provide exclusively capacity benefit. Foreign experts dealing in power engineering must be greatly surprised to find that those of us working in the NEA or EDC have hardly any knowledge about capacity benefits or, else the NEA would not have been forced to confront the adverse situation whereby it spends now about 50% of it revenue to buy electricity from the private developers perhaps more than 2/3 of such energy is completely wasted. The power benefit must be calculated as the sum of the capacity benefit and the energy benefit. The economics of the modern pump storage engineering is based on the fact that the power benefit of such pump storage plant can be high despite the fact that the energy benefit is negative because it can roughly be said that about 3 KWh electricity is spent to produce only 2 KWh electricity.

Indian Experience

It is very difficult to find good sites for hydropower projects like the Kulekhani-3 project suitable to meet the peak load of the system. The next alternative is the pumped storage plants despite the fact that there is a net energy loss in the system. It is said that realizing the great importance of the role to be played by the pumped storage power plants in the Indian power system, the Central Electricity Authority (CEA ) has undertaken a very extensive systematic survey of the entire country with a view to identify suitable sites which may help in development of economical pump storage schemes with a total installed capacity of 94000 MW.