Introduction

   Commissioned on the 22nd of March 2011, Lakvijaya (also known as Norrochcholai) Coal Power Plant is the largest power plant in Sri Lanka with a nameplate capacity of 900MW. Located on the Kalpitiya Peninsula in Puttalam, the plant produces 2,200 GWh annually and fulfills, at times, 78% of Sri Lanka’s total electricity supply. It was built through a Chinese contractor, financed primarily by a loan of $1.74B from the Export-Import Bank of China (EXIM).

   I visited the plant, along with WindForce’s Daily Life Wind Farm, on the 16th of June 2023 with the primary purpose of gaining insight into the engineering behind the plant. Additionally, Lakvijaya has been surrounded by a multitude of environmental concerns and complaints along with heaps of mechanical issues which had led to multiple islandwide blackouts in 2013, 2016, and 2019 – I wanted to gain further insight into the actual environmental cost that this plant sustains along with answers to why Lakvijaya has such a problematic past.

Plant specifications

   Lakvijaya is your typical baseload coal power plant, from its systems to its role in the Sri Lankan grid. It houses three Units, each containing a 300MW boiler-turbine system fed by bituminous coal imported from Indonesia. The whole plant (including each unit) takes 4-5 hours to generate maximum output from an idle state, if national demand requires it (the plant rarely sees even 50% output, more on that later).

   Before we can even talk about the three Units, we have to entertain the topic of fuel – bituminous coal. Sri Lanka does not have any coal deposits, which means the CEB has to import it from Indonesia – occasionally from African nations as well, although the Indonesian coal has a low sulfur content which translates to lower environmental damage and higher efficiency. Colliers station approximately 4km from the Puttalam coast awaiting coal barges from the shore to transport the coal back to a protruding jetty conveyor belt – the ocean is too shallow for the colliers to come any closer. The barges halt close to the jetty, where large robotic arms with buckets pick up the coal and place them on a long conveyor belt which takes it to the storage yard