Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) awarded the EPC contract to Vestas Asia Pacific AS, a world-renowned Danish wind turbine manufacturer, to build the 1st large scale wind farm in Sri Lanka, in the southern coast of Mannar island. Project comprises of 30 numbers of state-of-the-art wind turbines, each rated to 3.45 MW and total installed capacity of this wind farm is 103.5 MW. This is a culmination of a long-term effort by CEB to develop wind power in a large-scale manner exploiting the major monsoonal wind systems in Sri Lanka. In this project, CEB intends to harness power from wind in a large scale manner, on the same lines as it did with the hydropower potential in the last century.
Funding required for this wind farm and other associated facilities in Mannar and Anuradapura has been arranged through a loan provided by Asian Development Bank. The project is also supported with a consultancy service contract with COWI AS of Denmark and Warranty Operations and maintenance contract (WOM contract) for the initial three-year period. Total investment for the wind farm is approximately US Dollars 141 million. Once commissioned, Mannar wind farm could supply more than 380 million units of clean electricity to the national grid annually. Electricity from this project can be generated less than 5.0 US Cents/kWhr. One of the major benefits of this project is its ability to displace large amount of fossil fuel base electricity generation and thereby avoiding emissions amounting to 285,000 metric-tonnes of CO2 to the environment, annually.
Mannar wind farm will be operated as a semi dispatchable power plant supported with advance wind forecasting system to optimize & control the wind generated electricity to the national grid. This is in addition to the bird detection RADAR system to implement selective shut down of wind turbines to avoid bird collisions, if any.
Mannar Wind Farm is implemented as a benchmark project to ascertain the possibility of integrating large scale wind plants to the national grid with relevant grid support facilities. The project is also planned in line with the government’s policy target to achieve 20% nonconventional renewable power generation by year 2020.
The project work commenced in March 2019. All preliminary site development works have been completed. Designing of the wind turbine equipment is completed and deliveries of the plant and equipment to the site are in progress via Trincomalee and Colombo ports. Further to the wind farm civil works, construction of new service roads and rehabilitation of existing road network in the project area are being carried out. The project is schedule to be completed by November 2020.
READ MORE 
