The Ceylon Electricity Board - CEB, is the largest electricity company in Sri Lanka. With a market share of nearly 100%, it controls all major functions of electricity generation, transmission, distribution and retailing in Sri Lanka. It is one of the only two on-grid electricity companies in the country; the other being Lanka Electricity Company. The company earned approximately LKR 204.7 billion in 2014, with a total of nearly 5.42 million consumer accounts. It is a government owned and controlled utility of Sri Lanka that takes care of the general energy facilities of the island. The Ministry of Power and Energy is the responsible ministry above the CEB. Ceylon Electricity Board, established by an CEB Act No. 17 of 1969, is under legal obligation to develop and maintain an efficient, coordinated and economical system of Electricity supply in accordance with any Licenses issue
Electricity generation by CEB is primarily done by hydro power. Hydro power is the oldest and most dependent source of electricity generation, taking a share of nearly 42% of the total available grid capacity in December 2014, and 37% of power generated in 2014. Hydropower generation facilities has been constantly under development since the introduction of the national grid, but is currently declining due to the exhaustion of the resource. In 2014, then Media Spokesperson at the CEB, Senajith Dassanayake said the generation of hydro power has dropped to 37%; as a result, 60 percent of the electricity needs have to be fulfilled by thermal energy.
On October 2010, during a test run, a fire broke out in the chimney due to clogging. Splits in the cooling system piping triggered a shutdown down of the power plant. The Ceylon Electricity Board decided to institute blackouts to households and Industries for three hours a day until the fault is fully repaired.
On December 2013, more leaks were discovered in the cooling system, the CEB decided that the plant was too dangerous to operate at the moment. The CEB requested assistance from CMEC, and the company said that it would take about six weeks to fix the faults. After negotiations, the plant was repaired by CMEC and brought back online. A day later it failed once more and was shut down again for six more days.
On 25 February 2016, the entire country of Sri Lanka experienced a 3-hour blackout due to a lightning striking the national power grid.
On 13 March 2016, Sri Lanka experienced another 7 hour island wide blackout due to a damaged transformer in the 220 kV substation at Biyagama. It is considered to be the worst nationwide power outage in 20 years. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe appointed a five-member committee to investigate the blackout. Due to initial suspicions of sabotage, President Maithripala Sirisena deployed troops to guard electrical installations until the investigation was completed. The CEB also reported that the outage caused Lakvijaya Coal Power Plant to fail, resulting in a loss of 900 Mega Watts to the National Grid. On March 23, 2016, Power and Renewable Energy Minister Ranjith Siyambalapitiya notified parliament that the reason for the power outage was a lack of regular maintenance of power installations. The engineer in charge of the Biyagama Substation had previously reported that a key transformer needed maintenance; however, no repairs were made.
2019 electricity crisis
In March 2019, the CEB decided to impose four-hour rolling power cut on a scheduled basis throughout Sri Lanka after the national grid capacity failed to meet the increased demand for power due to dry climate, and due to limited power generation.
Losses
Ceylon Electricity Board has lost 25.5 billion rupees in 2011, and run up debts of 121 billion rupees with a petroleum distributor and independent power producers. In 2012, the CEB lost 61.2 billion rupees and the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation which supplied fuel below cost 89.7 billion rupees. To cover up the loss, the CEB increased power tariffs in large scales. The CEB expected to get revenues of 223 billion rupees—or 45 billion rupees more than the earlier tariff—from the price hike, but subsequently lost 33 billion rupees in 2013 on total expenses of 256 billion rupees. On 16 September 2014, after officially opening a completed $1.35 billion Chinese-financed 900 MW coal power plant project, Sri Lankan President at the time, Mahinda Rajapaksa addressed the nation saying that the electricity bills of the people will be reduced by 25%. The CEB stated that it will take about two weeks to come up with a process of creating electricity bills to reflect the reduction in prices.
Employee Tax
The CEB has been accused of Tax fraud by the Campaign for Free and Fair Elections, which has claimed that CEB has not deducted PAYE from its engineers and senior staff since 2010 amounting to Rs. 3465 million. CaFFE has claimed that this amount has been recovered from the consumer instead.
