Measures to manage electricity demand are no longer required from today, the National System Operator (Private) Company said on Thursday afternoon, after the second generating unit at the Norochcholai Lakvijaya power station returned to its full 270-megawatt capacity.
The company said the steps previously taken to manage demand had been suspended because the unit was now running at full output, Hiru News reported at 2.21 p.m.
That closes a sequence that began with the islandwide blackout and ran through three days of scheduled evening cuts.
The reconnection, and the decision, 40 minutes apart
The two filings on Thursday caught the story at different stages.
At 1.41 p.m., NewsFirst reported that the unit had been connected to the national grid and was contributing 225MW. The plant’s director, Engineer M.D. Nalaka Kumara, said a final decision on daily electricity management was expected once the unit reached its full capacity of 270MW and supplied that amount to the grid.
Forty minutes later, Hiru carried the decision itself: the unit had reached full capacity, and demand management was no longer needed.
The two accounts are consistent — the earlier one describes the condition, the later one records that it was met. Read on its own, the NewsFirst filing leaves the outcome open.
What is being lifted
This desk reported on 19 October that the Public Utilities Commission had cleared one-hour evening power cuts for three days, rotating across four groups on 19, 20 and 21 October, with Lakvijaya unavailable after the blackout.
Those cuts were scheduled to end on 21 October in any case. Thursday’s statement goes further: it removes the standing requirement for demand management rather than simply letting a schedule expire.
Update: why the restart took days
Later on Thursday the Ministry of Energy published an explanation of why restarting Norochcholai after a shutdown can take several days, carried by the Daily Mirror at 6.21 p.m. It is a general account of the process rather than a statement about this particular outage, but it answers the question the week’s coverage kept raising.
At the plant, coal is burned to heat water into high-pressure steam, which drives the turbines. A shutdown interrupts that process, and the equipment has to be prepared before generation can resume.
The ministry’s account identifies four constraints:
- Boiler temperature. The boiler and its metal components run at extremely high temperatures, and rapid cooling or reheating causes uneven expansion and contraction that can damage them. The boiler has to be brought back to temperature and pressure gradually.
- Turbine conditions. The turbines must be brought to the required temperature, pressure and operating conditions. Restarting them too quickly, without following the procedures, risks damaging expensive machinery.
- Fault diagnosis and inspection. Before any restart, engineers must identify what caused the shutdown and inspect critical components — pumps, valves, electrical systems and safety equipment. Any faults found must be repaired first.
- Synchronisation. Once steam is supplied to the turbine in a controlled way to raise its speed, the generator must be synchronised with the national grid before output can be increased, again gradually.
The ministry made a point of qualifying the premise. Not every shutdown needs several days — the time depends on the specific technical problem, the condition of the equipment and the procedures needed to restore the unit safely. A major malfunction or a long shutdown means a longer recovery.
Its closing point is that a restart “is not simply a matter of switching the plant back on.”
This does not resolve what actually kept unit two offline after the islandwide blackout. The ministry’s explanation is generic, and it still does not say which of these stages applied here or how long each took.
Not reported
Neither of the two original filings states the plant’s total output now that the second unit is back, nor whether the remaining units are at normal capacity. Neither says what caused the unit’s outage to persist beyond the initial blackout, nor whether the National System Operator expects the position to hold through the evening peak.
Neither gives a figure for the shortfall that demand management was covering, so the margin by which the system is now adequate is not public. The Public Utilities Commission, which approved the cuts, is not quoted on their withdrawal.
Ada Derana has been unreachable from this desk since late September, so any filing it has made on the reconnection is not cited here.
