Sri Lanka may have to go beyond its target of generating 70 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2030, Energy Minister Anura Karunathilaka has said, and the government will change how rooftop solar power is priced — a shift that bears directly on the bills of some 150,000 households with panels on their roofs.

The minister was speaking to AFP in an interview carried by the Daily Mirror on Sunday.

“There are some wake-up calls… pushing us to move more to renewable energy,” Karunathilaka said. “If we can get as much as possible from renewable energy, that would be our policy in the next few years.”

What the war did to the balance of payments

Sri Lanka imports all of its oil and gas. Since the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran — which in turn choked off the Strait of Hormuz — the country has faced sharp increases in fuel, gas and electricity prices, rationing, and inflation at a three-year high, all landing on an economy still recovering from the 2022 collapse.

The scale of the drain is the striking figure in the filing: the energy ministry says the government has at times spent up to 30 percent of its foreign exchange reserves in a single month on fossil fuel imports.

Against that, the existing target — 70 percent of electricity from renewables by 2030, up from about 60 percent now, including roughly 40 percent from hydropower — was set before the war. “We will probably have to go beyond 70 percent,” the minister said.

It is worth marking how firm that is. The minister said the government will probably have to exceed 70 percent; no revised target, date or figure has been published, and this is a statement of direction rather than an announced policy change.

Mannar says no

The transition is proving harder than the targets suggest, and the clearest example is wind.

Sri Lanka’s wind potential is estimated at 30 gigawatts. But residents of the northwestern Mannar peninsula blame the turbines operating there since 2020 for floods, declining fish catches and threats to migratory birds. Karunathilaka’s response was a commitment to stop expanding there:

“We have promised the people of Mannar… that only projects already approved or under construction will go ahead.”

Future wind farms, he said, will be built elsewhere. That carve-out leaves work already under way untouched — including the 50MW HayWind farm at Mannar, where the first turbines were erected in September and grid connection is targeted for December.

The grid problem, and the blackout

The second constraint is the grid itself. Rooftop solar has spread fast enough to cause sharp swings in supply, which often exceeds demand during daylight hours.

“The problem is the constraint in the transmission lines, availability and also control of the grid, as well as fluctuations in supply and demand,” Karunathilaka said. “From next year onwards, we have planned to enhance our transmission capacity, adding five major transmission network lines.”

The AFP filing attributes this month’s six-hour islandwide blackout to the grid tripping, “possibly because solar power generation exceeded consumption.”

That is now a third proposed cause for the same event. This desk’s reporting on the day recorded a suspected fault at the Upper Kotmale plant, which the minister himself said was under investigation; EconomyNext framed it as a coal plant trip destabilising a solar-heavy grid. No published finding reconciles the three, and no investigation report has been released.

The minister also addressed the suspicion that followed the blackout, when rooftop solar was disconnected and former minister Patali Champika Ranawaka alleged an agenda against it:

“Sometimes we have to curtail certain solar power plants to maintain the stability of the system. That is why some people have the perception that the government is not encouraging solar power. But that is not true.”

Solar capacity, he said, is to reach nearly 4,400 megawatts by 2029 — a 388 percent increase on 2024.

The repricing

The most consequential item for households is the pricing change.

Under the present arrangement, private producers feed electricity into the grid during the day, when generation peaks and demand is low, then draw back the same amount free at night, when electricity is more expensive. The minister called the arrangement financially unsustainable for a fragile economy.

In the fuller version of the same AFP interview carried by the Kuwait Times, he put the intention plainly: “We will propose a new financial model that is fair to both solar producers and consumers.” That version also carries a long-range claim absent from the Daily Mirror’s text — that in 10 to 15 years, reducing naphtha and coal, Sri Lanka “will be able to achieve 90-95 percent renewable energy.”

Neither version says when the new model would take effect, what it would pay, or whether existing net-metering agreements would be honoured.

What the money already looks like

Writing in Sunday’s Business Times, columnist Feizal Samath set out the arrears side of the same problem. Citing an earlier Sunday Times Business report, the column says unpaid dues to small and medium-scale renewable energy developers had risen past Rs. 10 billion by mid-2026, accumulating at roughly Rs. 2.5 billion a month, leaving more than 360 commercial investors and over 75 percent of 150,000 rooftop solar users financially stranded.

The column quotes renewable energy specialist Jeremy Fernando identifying the missing piece as storage at the household level — hybrid inverters that let a home use its own daytime solar at night instead of cycling it through the national grid.

Samath also reports the minister telling a recent parliamentary debate that Sri Lanka has begun offering oil and gas exploration licensing, with first licences ready by end-2027, bids evaluated through 2027 and licensing agreements finalised from October 2027 — the same government pursuing a faster renewable build-out is simultaneously reopening the Mannar basin to hydrocarbon exploration, which Cairn Lanka left in 2015.

Dating the interview

One caveat belongs on the record. AFP’s own photo caption on the wire states that the minister sat for the interview at his office in Colombo on 5 October, while the story moved on 25 October and refers to the mid-October blackout. The quotes may therefore be up to three weeks old, or the piece may combine an earlier sitting with later reporting; AFP does not say which.

Ada Derana also filed on the interview, under the headline “Sri Lanka to accelerate renewable energy transition amid rising global fuel costs” (adaderana.lk/news/250491), but the site has returned a CloudFront 403 to this desk for 41 consecutive days and no publication date could be extracted, so it is named here rather than cited.

One further figure is worth separating out. The “about 60 percent” the minister cites is a share of electricity generated. Industry filings earlier this month put renewables at around 69 percent of installed capacity — a different and always larger number, because wind and solar run intermittently while thermal plants can run continuously. As this desk noted in September, the two are routinely quoted side by side as if interchangeable. The gap from 60 to 70 percent of generation is the harder one.