Sri Lanka takes steps to connect to India

Sri Lanka takes steps to connect to India
By Mr. Pankaj Batra, Project Director, SARI/EI, I

Sri Lanka has initiated a country strategy for India with an eye on integrating its ‘fragile’ economy with the Indian economy with focus on eight sectors to boost fortunes, according to an article dated January 28, 2022 in the Economic Times.
The Gotabaya Rajapaksa-led government has identified energy, refineries, electricity grid, ports, real estate, tourism and information and communications technology for attracting investments from India.

Minister of Power of Sri Lanka, Gamini Lokuge, in an interview with the Daily Mirror in November 2021, talked about the plans for grid connectivity with India and Singapore in the future.

Sri Lanka has a target of achieving 70% Renewable Energy by 2030. It presently generates about 37% of energy from renewable energy sources (including hydro power plants). Renewable energy like wind and solar power, by themselves have become cheaper globally, in fact lesser than any other source of electricity. They are now becoming cheaper, even with energy storage, than the other sources of energy, with support of balancing of their intermittency over a larger geographical area. Sri Lanka, being an island with no electrical connectivity with any other country, therefore has to manage the intermittency within the country. This would be onerous and expensive. In this respect, connectivity of the electrical grid with the Indian grid would be much more efficient, since it would expand the balancing area hugely. The grid acts to a large extent as a big battery, due to demand and supply diversities, because of geographical dispersion, as well as differing electrical energy requirement due to differing weather conditions over the geographies. This is the logic behind the Prime Minister of India’s global vision of One Sun One World One Grid (OSOWOG), to which a lot of countries have aligned. If we have to save the world from climate change, all countries have to act together, for mutual
benefit.

Studies have been carried out for grid connectivity between India and Sri Lanka, a distance of 127 Km., both through a combination of under-sea cable and overhead lines as well as entirely through overhead lines (which is feasible due to the line passing over shallow waters). Transmission of power entirely through overhead lines works out much cheaper. Similar connections across seas exist worldwide. The 261 Km, 500 MW under-sea cable connection between UK and Ireland has been existing since 2012. The recently commissioned North Sea under-sea cable, measuring 450 miles (720 Km) between Norway and UK, is the longest in the world. Sri Lanka would benefit immensely, in fact to a much greater extent than would India. India, in any case, is connected to Bhutan, Bangladesh and Nepal. The gains to Sri Lanka would be many times over the cost of investment of the transmission interconnection, due to access to the power market in the connected grid of South Asia. A detailed cos benefit analysis would indicate as such.