PUCSL to employ int’l tool to asses future electricity demand

Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka Director General Damitha Kumarasinghe

The Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka (PUCSL), the electricity sector regulator, is planning to adopt an internationally accepted tool to review the forecasted electricity demand in Sri Lanka and to access the Long-Term Generation Expansion Plan (2015-2032) by the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB).

The tool named as Model for Analysis of Energy Demand (MAED) is developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and offered free of charge to the PUCSL. The MAED evaluates future energy demands based on medium- to longterm scenarios of socioeconomic, technological and demographic development.

The tool disaggregated the energy demand into a large number of end-use categories corresponding to different goods and services. Also, it estimates the influences of social, economic and technological driving factors from a given scenario. This combination supports to get an overall picture of future energy demand growth and facilitates forecasting of national power demand in line with the General Policy Guidelines on the Electricity Industry for the Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka. The most prominent feature of this model is its flexibility for representing the structure of energy consumption.

The model allows country-specific representations of energy consumption patterns using the MAED methodology. The user can now disaggregate energy consumption according to the needs and/or data availability in her/his country through this formula. As such, the MAED has now become a powerful tool for modelling widely diverse energy consumption patterns.

The PUCSL plans to use this tool to analysis and review the forecasted electricity demand. In order to familiarize and to strengthen the knowledge about the tool to forecast the future energy demand in the electricity sector, the commission organised a one-day workshop recently at Galle Face Hotel, Colombo. Ahmed Irej Jalal of the IAEA Nuclear Energy Department Planning and Economic Studies Section and Assistant Prof.

Mladen Zeljko, Head of Department Energy Generation and Transformation of Energy Institute Hrvoje Požar, Croatia, who conducted the sessions, said that it was important to predict the energy demand and find what would be the least cost generation plan, which should be economic and technically sound with adequate reliability in a time that demand is rising while sources of energy is declining. The electricity generation has been estimated for the year 2015 as 12901 GWh and it is expected to increase to 13451 GWh in 2016, the Long-Term Generation Expansion Plan (2015-2032) said.