KATHMANDU, NEPAL — Reliable access to electricity was already tenuous in most parts of Nepal before last month’s mammoth earthquake.
Now, with many villages and municipalities here about to enter their
second week without power — and with little expectation that the outages
can be addressed quickly, given the extent of damage to the nation’s
already fragile delivery infrastructure — many communities could be
facing a long, slow journey just to get back to a crude baseline of
regular power shortages.
More than a dozen hydropower plants — the chief source of electricity
generation in the country — have suffered damages as a result of 7.8
magnitude earthquake, reducing the country’s domestic power production
capabilities by as much as much as 30 percent, according to the state-run Nepal Electricity Authority,
which is responsible for about two-thirds of the nation’s domestic
electricity generation. At least six other power projects that were
under construction by NEA and a variety of smaller independent
producers, have suffered damages.
Nepal’s power and communications infrastructure was fragile even before the earthquake. (Photo: Tom Zeller Jr.)
Sher Singh Bhat, the deputy managing director of NEA,
said late Thursday that with the exception of the authority’s own
Sunkoshi Hydropower Project, which suffered serious damages in the
quake, most of NEA’s power plants were back in operation, but at least
eight private generating facilities remained completely offline.
What’s worse, extensive damage to the nation’s distribution network
— which delivers power from the transmission grid to individual homes
and businesses — will almost certainly keep hundreds of thousands of
Nepali’s in the dark and, for a country heavily reliant on mobile
telephones, struggling with basic communication.
“The number of all damaged distribution transformers may be in the
many hundreds or even thousands,” Bhat said in an email message.
“Reports of such damages are yet to be collected from remote areas where
communication is yet to be restored. Similarly, distribution lines
— including distribution poles, insulators and conductors — are damaged
in large quantities. The exact quantity is yet to be confirmed.”
Infrared satellite imagery released by the NASA’s Earth Observatory late last week — which compared
light output detected in Nepal over a 10 day period a month before the
quake to the period just before and after the event — hinted at the
impacts. In the image below, areas experiencing lower light output after
the earthquake appear in shades of orange:
Orange areas indicate where light output plummeted in the aftermath of last month’s earthquake in Nepal. (Image: NASA)
The rickety electricity system in Nepal had been expanding and, by
some accounts gradually improving since the end of a brutal civil war in
2006 and the establishment of a comparatively stable, if sometimes
fractious political system. The rapid deployment of small-scale, increasingly independent hydropower projects
in dozens of remote communities had helped to reduce the portion of
Nepal’s 28 million inhabitants without any access to electricity in
recent years to between one-quarter and one-third.
Fully electrified urban areas in and around the Kathmandu Valley
— while subject to routine, daily power outages, due to supply shortages
in the dry season (the Nepal Electricity Authority even makes this load
shedding schedule available for your Android phone) — had seen their daily outage hours gradually reduced, according to NEA’s 2014 annual report.
But the recent earthquake has dealt a substantive blow to these
progress benchmarks, and in more practical terms, it is severely
complicating recovery efforts in — and hindering communication with
— some of the thousands of remote towns and villages that dot the
mountainous the stretch out in all directions from the capital in
Kathmandu.
“Many folks I talk to — those who have gone to villages to
distribute relief supplies or those who have folks in affected villages
— tell me that one of the critical needs besides food and shelter is
electricity for lighting and mobile charging,” said Himal Karmacharya,
co-founder and CEO of Leapfrog Technology Inc.,
a software development company based in Kathmandu. “One guy who works
as a security guard in a polyclinic right in front of our office told me
that someone from his village comes down to the nearest town with 70-80
mobile phones every alternate day to do mass charging,” Karmacharya
said. “Mobile phones allow villagers to reach their kin or friends in
towns who can then pass their needs to relief agencies or government or,
in the absence of that, send basic supplies on their own.”
A couple in the remote village of Muchhok,
near the earthquake’s epicenter, stand amid what’s left of their home.
Power to the community has been cut for nearly two weeks. (Photo: Tom
Zeller Jr.) Karmacharya pointed to a Nepalese solar firm, Gham Power,
which is working with other businesses and stakeholders to identify
areas most in need of power and dispatch solar charging and lighting
kits as quickly as possible. They and other companies are partnering
with non-governmental organizations to raise funds toward this end, via
an IndieGogo campaign orchestrated by the Global Nepali Professional Network — an association of Nepal’s growing diaspora of professionals and entrepreneurs around the world.
With more than 2 percent of all global water resources at its
disposal, Nepal has long been poised to be a self-sustaining electricity
powerhouse. A prodigious monsoon season and vast water stores of the
Himalayan glaciers feed thick arterial river flows up and down this
mountainous nation, representing as much as 83,000 megawatts of hydropower potential — enough to overhaul a woefully underdeveloped economy and turn Nepal into a powerful regional electricity supplier.
Beset by political bickering, however, the nation has only managed to
harness less than one percent of that potential thus far, and the
recent earthquake is only likely to set things back further — though
China and India will be keen to get things on track as quickly as
possible. With burgeoning middle-class and electricity-hungry
populations of their own, both countries have been eyeing Nepal’s hydropower sector in recent years, and they have been pouring billions of dollars into infrastructure projects here.
Just this past September, Nepal’s government signed a $1.4 billion deal with the Indian infrastructure conglomerate GMR — the largest investment deal in the nation’s history, according to the Financial Times — to build a massive, 900 megawatt hydropower system on the upper Ghaghara River.
It is one of four such planned projects worth between $6 billion and $9 billion.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomzeller/2015/05/08/earthquake-strains-nepals-already-shaky-but-potentially-powerful-electricity-sector/?ss=energy
No comments:
Post a Comment