China-Lanka Buddhist Association sets up water purification plant in remote Lankan village
Posted on August 16th, 2019

Courtesy NewsIn.Asia

Colombo, August 16 (Xinhua): The Sri Lanka China Buddhist Friendship Association together with the Chinese Embassy in Colombo,  have donated a drinking water purification plant to the   Moragollagama village, in Kurunegala, in Sri Lanka’s  North Western Province.

China-Lanka Buddhist Association sets up water purification plant in remote Lankan village

A statement from the Chinese Embassy on Thursday said that the water purification facility is the fourth such facility donated by the Chinese Embassy to a remote village in Sri Lanka.

Lankan village kids have a look at the water purification plant

Moragollagama consists of 150 families, most of whom are living below the poverty line. Due to the scarcity of pure water in the area, villagers have to walk 10 kilometres to get water for their daily needs.

The new water purification facility will offer pure water free of charge to the villagers.

The Minister of Buddha Sasana, Gamini Jayawickrama Perera, speaking at the launch ceremony thanked China for its assistance and said that the government is looking forward to further strengthening ties and cooperation between China and Sri Lanka.

(The featured image at the top shows Sri Lankan village kids enjoy a glass of pure water from the purifying plant donated by China. Photos are by Thusitha) 

10 Responses to “China-Lanka Buddhist Association sets up water purification plant in remote Lankan village”

  1. aloy Says:

    Hon. Minister Perera,

    Yes, we appreciate the donation of four water purification plants by the Chinese to our villagers who are suffering the CKDu.

    But, fabricating these machines is not rocket science. There are enough small scale manufacturers in SL who can make these machines. Tell your colleagues in the cabinet to give them orders to make few of these instead of awarding inflated contract to foreigners. If you had saved money by not increasing one section (a 28 km section) of the Matara- Hambantota expressway from Rs. 8 billion to Rs. 28 billion which was awarded to Chinese, perhaps hundreds of these machines could have been even imported from elsewhere at no extra cost to the country.

    We appreciate the

  2. Randeniyage Says:

    If these machines are produced in Sri Lanka salary of ministers and officials may have to be increased to keep maintain their living standards.

  3. Ananda-USA Says:

    Aloy,well said …INDEED these are simple equipment, and should be manufactured in Sri Lanka, perhaps as a village level industry, perhaps buying only the key part, the filter membranes, that cannot be manufactured in villages, from China.

    One thing you said is not right: these are outright gifts from China, and are NOT PURCHASED under contracts from China.

  4. aloy Says:

    Ananda, I knew very well that what the Chinese have given were gifts. In fact I started writing the appreciation, but somehow it got posted without the complete sentence.

    I never wanted to devalue their assistance, but felt ashamed that the children of current generation of Sinhalese have to drink water as shown in the first picture, when their ancestors supplied the largest ships to China for them to dominate the waves of Indian ocean.

    Our fellows have been reduced to become beggars by seventy years of misrule. Even the university education have been messed up. It is only the ragging and protest marches that they do well. No academic studies at all. Even after they become professionals they hardly have any interest to do things correctly.
    Have a look at the calcs done by a professional on solar power generation and verified by two other M&E professionals to be correct. This has been presented to a minister whose officials also did not find anything wrong as he had not told the fellow off:

    “there are 4,000,000 roofs in sri lanka – homes alone
    not taking into account massive institutions.
    if we can generate a modest 1000 watts of power
    daily installing solar panels on these roofs, i.e.
    1kw or 1 UNIT, we can generate 4,000,000,000 watts
    or 4,000,000 kw or 4 megawatts of power DAILY.
    hence 4×365 is
    1460 megawatts yearly. if you install a 250kwatt panel
    you can easily generate 1 kw daily form a single roof.,this is just a modest
    estimate or a minimum estimate. considering all
    roofs in the island, substantial amount of power can be generated on
    a daily basis”
    No wonder our ministries are mismanaged.

  5. Ananda-USA Says:

    Aloy,

    Yes, perhaps the most troubling aspect of the conversation is the apparent confusion of KW with KWh.

    I find that many people in SL lacking a basic science background confuse the RATE of Energy in use or being produced, ie the Power, in KW with the cumulative Energy contained, used or produced in KWh, so when the time periods of daily and yearly in the conversation are applied to power generation, it makes no sense!

    Also, there is no recognition here of site-specific capacity factors that reduce the energy produced below the maximum from full-sun normally irradiation, and the excessive cost of the solar generation when panels are deployed in tiny systems. Unit cost considerations that apply to large scale power production do not apply to a small solar panel charging a battery and lighting a few bulbs in a remote village unconnected to the grid. In such situations, at high per unit cost can be justified, but not when applied to assess the economic feasibility of bulk power generation.

    As you point out, it is UNPARDONABLE in a person proposing an energy generation project, and would be funny if these buggers were not running our government and impacting our lives.

    Blind leading the Blind and Deaf, shall we say? Let us give the project proposer an A+ for effort and a C- for knowledge, and execute the Minister who should know his LIMITS!

  6. Ananda-USA Says:

    An explanation of Solar Energy Production from Roof top Solar Panels.

    The label rating of a Solar Panels can be approximately described as the POWER in watts it produces when it is illuminated normal to its area by a light beam equal in strength to that of the sun at noon near the equator.

    Near the equator, the irradiation due to the sun is approximately 1 KW/m^2, so a solar panel of 1 m^2 surface area oriented normal to the incident light receives 1 Joule of energy every second. That the Power of the incident light radiation is 1 KW.

    However, several factors reduce the ELECTRICAL ENERGY produced below this maximum incident light ENERGY level. They are,

    1. CONVERSION EFFICIENCY: the power conversion efficiency from light energy to electrical energy of a solar panel is not 100%, and is typically about 15 to 20%, being higher for panels made from crystalline semiconductors than for amorphous semiconductors. The Output Electrical Power divided by the Power of the Incident Light is the CONVERSION EFFICIENCY FACTOR.

    2. ORIENTATION of the SOLAR PANEL: the oreientation of the solar panel at any given time (daily and seasonal) may not be normal to the direction of the radiation from the sun as it rises, passes overhead, and sets during the day, and may never pass overhead at noon depending on the season and the latitude of the location of the solar panel. According to Lambert’s Cosine law, this introduces a multiplicative orientation factor equal to the Cosine of the angle between the direction of the incident light and the normal to the solar panel’s surface. Thef the beam normal to the solar panel divided by the intensity of the incident beam intensity is the SOLAR PANEL ORIENTATION FACTOR.

    3. ATTITUDE OF THE SUN: Even if the solar panel is always oriented towards the sun (as in a solar panel mounted on a sun tracking frame), the curvature of the earth and the extra path through the atmosphere when the sun is rising and setting, and seasonal atmospheric variations reduce the incident light radiation below the maximum strength at noon. Therefore, the intensity of solar radiation arriving at the location of the solar panel rises from zero in the morning, rises to a maximum plateau near noon, and decreases to zero at sunset. The intensity of the solar radiation at thelocationof the solar panel at any given time divided by the maximum plateau level is the SOLAR ATTITUDE FACTOR.

    In an approximate way,we can say that the CAPACITY FACTOR is the multiplicative product of the CONVERSION EFFICIENCY FACTOR which is a property of the solar panel, the ORIENTATION FACTOR which is a property of how the solar panel is mounted being higher if it continuously tracks the sun, and the SOLAR ATTITUDE FACTOR which is a factor that determines the total amount of solar radiation that arrives at the location,and reflects promarily the daily variation of solar radiation from sunrise to sunset.

    The overall CAPACITY FACTOR is about 10 tp 15%. Therefore, 1KW FIXED ORIENTATION array will produce 0.1 KWh to 0.15KWh of electricity per day, ON AVERAGE!

    To return to the example Aloy’s cited:

    Each 1KW array installed on roofs, and mounted looking vertically upwards, will produce 0.1 to 0.15 KWh per day.
    4,000,000 such arrays will produce 400,000 KWh to 600,000 KWh per day, or 400 MWh to 600 MWh per day (1 MWh = 1000 KWh), or 146 GWh to 219 GWh (1 GWh = 1000 MWh) of electrical energy yearly.

    To put this in perspective, assuming PRICE of electricity to be 0.22 Rs/KWh, the VALUE of the energy produced is Rs 32.12 Trillion to Rs 48.18 Trillion.

    To assess whether this is a good thing to do, we should determine the COST of producing this amount of electric energy, factoring in the LIFETIME benefits of foreign exchange saved on fuel oil imports versus that expended on solar panel imports,and the lifetime costs of competing renewable energy technologies like wind energy (reputed to be less than for Solar Panel energy).

    Solar panels have a long life, still producing 80% of rated power after 30 years, and LOW operating expenses unlike Wind energy.

    The capital cost of solar installations is high, even for LARGE installations, and MUCH higher cost per unit of electricity produced for small installations, but what makes it worthwhile is that FUEL COST of solar is ZERO because sunlight is free.

    Because sunlight represents diffuse energy, solar plants are large compared to wind, and require lots of expensive land that excludes other uses such as farming. That is where ROOFTOP Solar makes MUCH sense in densely populated countries such as Sri Lanka, because the roof will now be used for DUAL PURPOSES, to provide shelter to residents AND to generate electricity!

  7. Ananda-USA Says:

    I EMPHASIZE: The VALUE of Electricity Produced 32.2 Trillion to 48.18 Trillion given above is YEARLY!

  8. aloy Says:

    Ananda,
    Sorry to take this thread on a detour. I think we should discuss this on a separate article.

    However I would like to put in a few things here to conclude our discussion.

    A joule per second is one watt.
    one KWh in SL presently is around Rs. 20.00
    I think the value of solar on 4 million roofs cannot be in Trillions perhaps around Rs. 60 billion taking into account of ten panels (of 250 watts) per house. it seems in the US an average house has 25-35 panels.
    Thanks.

  9. Ananda-USA Says:

    Aloy,

    OOPS! Thank you, I made a mistake. I should have written,

    “The overall CAPACITY FACTOR is about 10 tp 15%. Therefore, 1KW FIXED ORIENTATION array will produce 0.1 KW to 0.15KW of electrical POWER, ON AVERAGE!”

    “Therefore, each 1KW array installed on roofs, and mounted looking vertically upwards, will produce 0.1 to 0.15 KW of Electrical POWER on AVERAGE, and 4,000,000 such arrays generating on AVERAGE 400,000 KW to 600,000 KW of electrical power on AVERAGE, when multiplied by 24 x 365 hours per year, will produce 3,504 GWh to 5,256 GWh (1GWh = 1,000,000 KWh) of electrical energy yearly.”

    “To put this in perspective, assuming the PRICE of electricity to be 0.22 Rs/KWh, the VALUE of the energy produced is Rs 771 Million to Rs 1,156 Million.”

    Thanks for catching my error, Aloy!

  10. Ananda-USA Says:

    Aloy,

    OOPS Again! My price of Electricity in SL should be 22 Rs/KWh,and not the 0.22 Rs/KWh I wrote by mistake.

    So, the revised last sentence is

    ““To put this in perspective, assuming the PRICE of electricity to be 22 Rs/KWh, the VALUE of the energy produced is Rs 77.1 Billion to Rs 115.6 Billion.”

    So, your value of Rs 60 Billion is CORRECT!

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