‘Sales of Energy’-An Upcoming Challenge

Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) celebrates 35 years of its service of power production, transmission and distribution. NEA claims the year 2019/20 as one more successful year in supplying continuous power to its consumers and maintaining sound financial health. After tumultuous years of losses NEA is now a profit making organization since 2016/17. Its system loss has come down to 15.27% from 25.78% in 2016. According to annual report of NEA for the year 2019/20 total population with access to electricity infrastructure has reached 86% of the total household. Total number of electricity consumers increased by 7.8% from 3.91 million to 4.22 million during 2019/20. These data does not include consumers under community rural electrification, which is serving about 0.57 million consumers in rural areas. Among the entire electricity consumers domestic consumers share the largest category with 93.24% share. Industrial consumer has a share of just 1.33% but has the highest share of 45.31% in revenue generation and 35.83% as sales share. Domestic consumer has 35.27% and 44.34% share in revenue and sales.

Two new power plants, namely Upper Trishuli 3A (60 MW) and Kulekhani III (14 MW) is added to the system contributing an increase in electricity generation. NEA’s hydropower plants including small power stations generated a total of 3021 GWh of electricity in FY 2019/20. It is an increase by 18.57% over the generation of 2548 GWh in FY 2018/19. There was a decrease of 38.55% energy import from India, 1729 GWh in 2019/20 and 2813.07 GWh in 2018/19. The contribution of energy imported from India contributed 22.33% out of total available energy. Total installed capacity of NEA is 1332 MW, including 14 major hydropower stations (563.15 MW), 17 small hydro power plants (14.244 MW), 23 small hydro power plants (isolated) (4.536 MW), 2 thermal power plants (53.41 MW) and 3 solar power plants (1350 kW).

According to reports from various directorates of NEA, Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown hampered in its regular growth. The effect of the lockdown has caused lesser revenue from the industrial sector.

 Since 2016/17 there was continuous decrease in load shedding. Before this we were forced to live in darkness with hours of load shedding. During the last four years Nepal has seen brighter times, helping countries economy to go forward. At the same time, it has also helped a great deal in saving valuable foreign currency reserve of the country which has been used to import batteries, inverters, solar panels and additional fossil fuels for generators.

As per the report, fulfilling the energy demand was the biggest challenge of NEA in the past. As per current status sale of energy is going to pose a serious challenge for NEA in coming year as 1000 MW of generation is to be commissioned by the year 2021 alone.