Power minister Champika Ranawaka told reporters Wednesday two out of six major shutdowns were due to the failure of a transmission line built to evacuate power, which fell along an arid coastal area.
The build up of salt during a five month long dry spell had resulted in the failure of the transmission line.
The 300MegaWatt coal plant's core machinery - generator and turbine - was of good quality and had no defects but shut downs were due to failing ancillary equipment, CEB's deputy chairman Anura Wijepala said.
The plant had generated 6GigaWatts hours of energy yesterday after being re-started, allowing the CEB to stop power cuts, Minister Ranawaka said.
He said Chinese and Sri Lankan engineers had come up with reports suggesting changes to the other two plants to incorporate lessons learnt with the first plants.No cost estimates for the changes were disclosed.
"We are working with CEB engineers to bring the plant to normal operations," Wang Lu Dong, chief engineer of CMEC said.
"We will work together on commercial or technical issues. If we work together we can solve these problems."
The coal plant is still within a two year 'defect notification period' which ends in July 2013.
"This plant is still not finished," minister Ranawaka said.
The plant's designer Zhao Wenxue, from China's Northwest Electric Design Institute said in a statement last month said frequent shutdowns and lack of annual maintenance had contributed to the shutdowns.
He said some repairs should be made while the plant was operating. CEB officials said and procedures were also developed to safely shut down the plant.
The coal had operated without a break from February to August this year. In the past year the plant had generated
To generate the same amount from a combined cycle plant at 15.79 rupees a unit would cost 29.6 billion rupees.
During the past year the plant had generated 1,875 GigaWatt hours (millions of units of electricity) at a cost of 6.67 rupees a unit totaling 12.5 billion rupees.
To generate the same amount of energy from a combined cycle plant at 15.79 rupees a unit would cost 29.6 billion rupees.
