Load Shedding Revisited….

Ok, I’ve talked about this before but now I am officially complaining. Load shedding has taken hold big time, as most of Nepal is without electricity for 16 hours per day. Yup, that’s right. Electricity is on for only about 8 hours every day. So, as I mentioned before, the problems have been mounting as we are faced with an electricity supply “perfect storm” as it were. We are in the dry season, so water levels are low and Nepal traditionally cannot produce enough electricity through it’s hydro-electric dams to meet the demand of the country. Couple this with infrastructure problems with one of the dams. Nepal also normally imports electricity from India to make up it’s electricity shortfall, but due to flooding last spring of the Koshi river, power lines were damaged and electricity imports stopped. Beyond the situational problems, the chronic shortfall is also a comment on the inability of the government to install new generating capacity over the past decade due to a variety of reasons including political turmoil. In fact, Nepal’s current electricity demand is in the neighbourhood of 800 Megawatts (MW) and the current supply is roughly 260 MW. Thus…. 16 hours of load shedding. So, now we wait in the dark for… 1) the snow to melt (to bring water to the dams) 2) infrastructure repair, and 3) the monsoon rainfalls

Incidentally, I had mentioned before that because of our close living proximity to the Prime Minister we were not getting any load shedding. This privilege has disappeared. Fortunately we are not experiencing 16 hours a day like most areas, but that being said, our power outages can be quite unpredictable.

The effects of load shedding have taken a terrible toll on businesses. Getting work done can be incredibly difficult. Some solutions are power inverters (like a battery back-up) but this tends to compounds problems as when the power is on, there is an increased load due to people powering up their inverters. There is also the generator solution, but this also comes at added expense with only a small amount of generative capacity (enough to keep the lights on, but not much more). There is also the additional problem of a sizeable increase in GHG emissions and air quality degradation (as if that needs to get worse!) with the burning of diesel fuel. There is definitely no easy solution to the problem and the government faces real challenges with electricity supply. There have already been many protests regarding load shedding and articles in the newspaper about it almost every day….