Sri Lanka’s electricity regulator says the new Electricity Act could attract foreign direct investment into power generation by replacing the single-buyer model with a competitive market — but only once the remaining legal groundwork is finished.

Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka Director General and CEO Damitha Kumarasinghe said the Electricity Act No. 36 of 2024, which he said came into force in March 2026, provides for multiple buyers and suppliers, allowing generators to explore selling directly to customers rather than relying solely on the national system operator, the Daily FT reported.

“The new Electricity Act gives options for everybody. Options for electricity user and options for investors, both existing and future,” he said.

What changes

Under the previous framework, procurement powers were concentrated in the Ceylon Electricity Board, creating a single buyer for electricity. The new framework envisages a multi-buyer market in which generators identify their own buyers and route power to them across the network, subject to the applicable legal and regulatory arrangements.

Kumarasinghe said this could ease the procurement constraints investors have faced and widen scope for private participation in generation and supply. Businesses and households could in turn have more options, including alternative suppliers and self-generation, depending on the final framework.

The caveat

The benefits depend on completing the outstanding legal steps needed to implement the Act in full. “We need to quickly do the necessary legal actions to create a level playing field,” Kumarasinghe said, warning that without them the system could remain centred on the national system operator, limiting the gains.

He also identified fair network-use charges as important to making private electricity transactions commercially viable — the price a generator pays to move power across a grid it does not own.

When this was said

The remarks were made at the Sri Lanka Economic and Investment Summit 2026, the two-day Ceylon Chamber of Commerce event held at the Shangri-La Colombo on 13 and 14 October. The Daily FT published this account of the session on 31 October. It is a write-up of a session roughly a fortnight earlier, not a new announcement; this desk reported the President’s plan to tender four transmission lines to private developers from the same summit.

Not reported

The filing does not specify which legal instruments remain outstanding, give a timetable for them, or say what network-use charge methodology the PUCSL intends to apply. It reports no CEB response and names no prospective investor.

Single source. No other verified newsroom this desk could fetch had published this session account.