Today there was a tentative plan to visit the Morogolla project site and Kotmale power plant. It didn’t work out because the bore holes were not drilled so there was no point going. Because of this we covered all the topics by yesterday. So we had pretty much nothing to do today. Yet we had a small discussion among ourselves and with Mr. Anuruddha on various topics.

Some time back there was a buzz about restructuring the electricity generation, transmission and distribution system. With the growing number of consumers and capacity it’s hard for CEB to manage everything. A proposal was put forward to restructure the system by appointing different organizations to handle generation, transmission and distribution. It is always spoken about that CEB is running at a loss. That is because the cabinet doesn’t approve tariff hikes due to political reasons. However, semi privatizing the Electrical Power system seems farfetched because it will in turn lose governments control over the power sector. Due to this, we will not experience a restructuring process in near future.

Today was the last day at Generation Planning Branch. Next Monday we have to report to LECO to learn about distribution with Prof. Narendra De Silva.

I had the sports council photo today with the Vice Chancellor. At the regal cinema car park a very polite gentleman dent my car which cost me 45 minutes. After all this I was able to come to the office at 12pm. By that time Mr. Anuruddha was explaining the generation planning procedure. I quickly oriented with the flow and joined in with the discussion.

Mrs. Kudalugama invited us to come see the Moragolla feasibility study in operation if the bore holes are going to be dug soon. Probably it’ll happen over the weekend. None of us are interested to spend a weekend going to see a site. But we might change our mind if we could go see other power plants nearby which belongs to Mahaweli Complex because our team is chose Laxapana Complex over Mahaweli for hydro generation part.

Mr. Anurudda explained basics of the WASP software after lunch and Mrs. Samanthi discussed about IPP’s and renewable energy.

I forgot my bag in the security counter yesterday. I tried to call them yesterday itself to inform them that the bag belongs to me but no one answered the phone. Nothing valuable was in there. Luckily today morning I found it the way it was left on the rack. I guess the place has a good staff.

I couldn't tell about the really amusing lift they have at CEB. It's called a paternoster. Here's a video of it. I'm tellin ya, its pretty fun to ride.



Moragolla Project
Mrs. Kudalugama explained to us how a project is carried out in the Transmission and Generation Planning division. She shared her experiences with us on the Moragolla project because she was the project engineer there.


Demand forecasting
Mrs. Thushara explained to us what demand forecasting is. Frankly I found this a bit boring because it’s all about data analysis. There are several models to predict future demand. The calculations are done using software like SPPP, simple-E, etc.

Today was the 1st day at CEB head office. It’s situated near the lake house. We left our bags at the security office. (They didn’t give us any token) The transmission and generation planning division is on the 5th floor. We got a temporary pass from the security desk and went on the tricky elevator to the 5th floor. We are supposed to come there before 9am. We are off at 4.15pm. There’s a book to sign at the office on the 5th floor as you come in the morning and leave in the afternoon. We are trained under the chief engineer transmission planning and chief engineer generation planning. The transmission planning office is squeezed in to the generation planning office because of maintenance work, so there’s very less place. Therefore group 1 (that’s us) and group 2 were put together to learn generation planning during this week. According to the schedule we have generation planning on the 17th week. But we are going to do generation planning this week and transmission planning on the 17th week with the last group. We were given security passes today itself. The appointment letter and the schedule were required for the passes today. We cannot get permission to use the CEB head office car park.

We waited till about 11am until the CE had a bit of time for us. Then he gave us an introduction to what is being done here. He gave us a list of things to ask from other engineers who were working there. We are supposed to go and get details on them when they having a bit of free time.