Dark country
From today, every household in the country will face three hours of power cuts daily. In February, power cut duration will be doubled. For a country bestowed by nature with tremendous hydropower potential, this is more than just an irony: it is outrageous. What we are facing today owes to total lack of planning and far-sightedness in the country's power sector think-tanks. Electricity is no longer a luxury. It is a necessity and a right that a state must guarantee its taxpayers given people's degree of electricity-dependence in everyday life. Strangely, there has not been a single instance, when someone from the government has apologized people for the inconvenience caused by power cuts. All that we get are notices of ever increasing power cuts. Power cuts inconvenience students preparing for exams, offices that these days cannot do without computers, small-scale industries that cannot afford their own alternative sources of power, and in winter, we are left freezing with our heaters not working. Power cuts are also associated with a rise in crime.
The losses caused by power cuts during daytime, when most white collar workers need to work on their computers, cannot be measured on a scale. Still, any citizen can imagine the degree of losses this causes in terms of wasted working hours. When we have six hours of power cuts in daytime for two days every week in February, offices that cannot afford generators will probably have to pull down shutters. The country has a total installed capacity of 611 megawatts, including run-of-river, storage, and thermal plants. The run-of-river projects, that contribute 440 megawatts out of this, are producing only 190 megawatts. Even with 80 megawatts of power imported from India, the country is already facing a shortage of 1.3 million units of electricity everyday. With only low-voltage transmission links connecting Nepali and Indian power grids, it is not possible to import much power from India to address Nepal's winter power crisis. And India has its own export limitations.
Let us forget the past mistakes. Let us also forget 70-megawatt Middle Marsyangdi because by the time it comes into operation, the country's demand-supply gap will already have surpassed the project's generation capacity. Effort is underway to gather funds to build 309-megawatt Upper Tamakoshi. But it will take half a decade for the project to complete and Nepal's power demand will exceed 1,000 megawatts by 2012. Even Upper Tamakoshi will not be able to completely address the power crisis. What we need at the moment is immediate relief from the power crisis. Diesel plants should be seriously considered as an option. A campaign to encourage people to use electric gadgets and bulbs that consume less electricity is also an urgent necessity. In the meantime, a major project for internal consumption of power should enter construction immediately. Dilly-dallying on this will take the country back to the dark-age.
