CEB’s mini diesel generator emergency power plan becomes worthless
The Ceylon Electricity Board’s (CEB) piecemeal solution to add 100 MW of capacity to the national grid by installing mini diesel generators spending billions of rupees to provide uninterrupted electricity supply has become a worthless endeavour, an internal investigation committee report revealed.
The emergency power of these generators is connected to the national grid when a power shortage or breakdown is encountered, a top official of Power and Energy Ministry said.
Fifty mini diesel generators with a capacity of 1MW each were procured in a tender tainted with malpractices, manipulations and irregularities, the investigation report observed.
Some of these generators were out of order due to technical faults and beyond repair, President of the CEB executive technical engineers and supervisors union, A.G.U. Nishantha said.
He noted that the internal investigation committee was appointed by the then top management of the CEB following their union’s representations on malpractices and irregularities in the tender procedure to select the suitable supplier for these generators, he disclosed.
However the decision to award the tender to procure 50 mini diesel generators to a disqualified bidder has caused an unwarranted delay in the implementation of the emergency power supply programme, he said.
The tender called by the CEB for the supply, installation and commissioning of 50 1MW/1.25 MVA containerised package diesel generators, 25 step-up containerised transformer units and 25 containerised diesel fuel tanks was awarded to Sterling &
Wilson of India which was earlier rejected by the Technical Evaluation Committee (TEC), the probe revealed.
The TEC has recommended Senok Trade Combine Pvt Ltd as the most responsive and lowest bidder with no deviations from the procurement criteria, a senior member of the engineers union said noting that none of the engineers’ input was taken into consideration.
However the decision to award the tender to procure 50 mini diesel generators to a disqualified bidder has caused an unwarranted delay in the implementation of the emergency power supply programme, he said.
The senior Energy Ministry official confirmed that these generators were not operational at the beginning and was only operational after the upgrade but some of them were now ineffective.
It has also been observed that 10 units of generators have arrived without following proper tender procedure payments terms and completely deviating from tender conditions, further alarmingly there are many flaws in the specifications and mainly the sound proof level is not up to the required and permissible level.
This has created a serious noise pollution disturbing the environment and the hospitals around the generator installed area effecting ear drums of small children in the vicinity thus risking the community at large, the investigation report revealed.