COLOMBO: Sri Lanka plans a new project with Finnish assistance to generate electricity from tidal power, the power ministry said. Following a meeting with Ambassador of Finland to Sri Lanka Rauli Suikkanen, Ranjith Siyambalapitiya the minister for power and renewable energy said the ambassador had expressed his fullest support for the project. “Since we have sea around the country we can easily generate power using sea tidals,” Siyambalapitiya said. “We can start this project with low cost using new technology and we even can forecast the power generation capacity.”
Minister further stated that this will be one of the solutions to the drought conditions increasingly experienced in Sri Lanka. Tidal energy is a form of hydropower that converts the energy obtained from tides into useful forms of power, mainly electricity. Although not yet widely used, tidal power has potential for future electricity generation and tides are more predictable than wind energy and solar power.
Among sources of renewable energy, tidal power has traditionally suffered from relatively high cost and limited availability of sites with sufficiently high tidal ranges or flow velocities, thus constricting its total availability. Many recent technological developments and improvements however indicate that the total availability of tidal power may be much higher than previously assumed, and that economic and environmental costs may be brought down to competitive levels.
