Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB), a Sri Lankan government owned utility, has signed a US$55.7M contract with Swedish company Skanska for the construction of the 70MW Kukule Ganga hydro power project. The project is being funded by the Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund of Japan and the CEB.
Construction of the hydro power project, located about 80km southeast of the capital city Colombo, is to be split into six main contracts. The main civil construction of the underground power house will begin this year and the project will be completed in December 2002.
Meanwhile, a project to generate power from sea waves is to be undertaken at a site near Rumassala, Galle in southern Sri Lanka.
The pilot project, to be completed by the end of 1999, comes in the wake of many experiments conducted by the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka. The faculty has been conducting experiments on mathematical models of an oscillatory wave chamber power plant.
Sri Lanka’s power generating system comprises 1135 MW of hydroelectric power and 478MW of thermal power.