(June 27, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) In the first instance, we should look for ways and means of saving energy in areas where energy can be easily saved. Of these, the easiest is to reduce energy by replacing about three filament light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs in every household by CEB, to recover its cost in a year. If three of 60watt filament bulbs are lit for three hours a day it will consume 16.2 units of electricity a month and if they are replaced by CFL it will consume only three units. Accordingly, CEB could save 50 million units a month just by replacing three bulbs in every household that is supplied with electricity. The total cost can be recovered from the households by including Rs.100 in the monthly electricity bill in a year.
It is interesting to note that the consumer will save more than 100 rupees from this change and CEB will benefit more not only by generating 50 million units a month less but also by reducing 560MW of power from the peak power demand.
Another area energy can be saved is cooking and it is mostly done with gas and kerosene oil and both these waste more than 60% of the energy as the heat generated by these cookers cannot be controlled so precisely like modern electric cookers. Hence it is worth focusing our mind as how we can replace them with electric cookers, which are now controlled electronically to minimise wastage.
However, there is a problem with regard to electric cookers because of the high wattage required to power these from our system of generation and distribution. Hence, the next best cooker is microwave oven, which takes less power and time, can be used for cooking our standard meals rice and curry. It can heat only water and hence only the food, which contains water, gets the heat and not even the utensils get heated directly from it. Although, even this cannot be handled from a centralised large power station it can be handled from solar panels with a little bit of support from the power system.
For cooking with microwave it takes less than a unit of electricity a day for both meals for a small family of three or four people. If the cooking of mid- day meals and night meals could be confined to 11 AM and 4 PM through timers as done in other countries
for water heaters this too could be handled without creating any disturbance to the power system.
I myself when stationed in a remote area of Western Australia had to cook my own meals as my family had to stay in Perth. I had a tremendous task of cooking with gas using several pots and pans. Since it was too much for one person I went on cooking with a microwave oven and after a few failures I perfected it and I had only the divided tray to deal with instead of pots and pans. In one compartment I put rice, meat in another and vegetable in the third with the necessary ingredients covered with water and allowed to cook for 12 minutes. Thereafter, I took the tray out and added milk to meat and vegetable and little more water to rice and allowed another 6 minutes to cook. It was a perfect meal on a tray and I was able to eat straight from it so that I had to wash only one item. The electricity consumption was only 0.16 units of electricity. For three people, if the food is cooked in three separate trays, yet the consumption will be around half a unit making under one unit of electricity a day for both meals.
Microwave ovens are not so expensive now and they are quite robust to last at least 15 years. Medium size oven is taking only 500watts and even that is too much for our power system if half the 4 million households take to microwave cooking with a power demand of 500MW (full load of 1000MW staggered or with a diversity factor of 0.5). Even with a coal power station of 500MW cannot feed this load, as the power distribution system cannot handle it.
However, this can be handled by providing a 250watt solar panel for each house confining the cooking hours during the daytime as mentioned above. This panel will generate 1.25 units of electricity a day and it will be just sufficient for cooking and also to light three CFL for three or four hours in the night without drawing any additional power from the national grid. The national grid will be used only for accommodating the power according to the usage.
If we can get this organised properly gas will not be needed for our domestic cooking. These two major items mentioned herein will also contribute to emission trading scheme for the Kyoto Protocol to take notice of. Australia ratified the Kyoto Protocol to make 20% of the total power generation from wind and solar by the year 2020. This means the generation of about 8000MW of power from wind and solar. If they could generate 8000M of power thus, why cannot we generate at least 1000MW from solar and wind.
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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