Delusion of fund raising: How a group of electrical engineers is starving power sector of investment

THE amendments to the Electricity Act No. 36 of 2024 will be debated in Parliament today (6 August) and will likely pass with a majority of votes, due to the NPP voting block. During the run-up to the parliamentary debate, the amendments, and its custodian, Pubudu Niroshan, the Director General of the Power Sector Reform Secretariat (PSRS), has managed to unify almost all the sector participants in opposition.

- 

These include the development finance institutions (DFIs — World Bank, JICA and ADB), chambers of commerce and other industry groups, independent think tanks, State institutions such as PUCSL and LECO, generation companies (LTL Holdings and renewable energy developers), CEB unions and opposition parties¹. It is also illustrative that no single entity has come to support the Amendments, a stark contrast to the passing of the 2024 Act, which had broad support of institutions including some CEB unions.

While the major concerns regarding the amendments have been published in Daily FT in multiple articles, including the opposition of DFIs, chambers and Advocata, this article focuses on funding challenges, building on the excellent article by Chanaka Wickramasuriya on 4 August 2025 (https://www.ft.lk/opinion/Financing-Sri-Lanka-s-electricity-sector-growth-and-transition/14-779825).

One of the main reasons for the reform process, initiated in 2021, was the financial sustainability of the power sector, which was looking at large investment needs, in the context of an economy recovering from recession, coming out of a default, constrained by an IMF program. It is universally agreed that CEB has underinvested in infrastructure, with most part of the country continuously facing power quality and reliability issues. The susceptibility of the grid to blackouts (roughly once in 18 months) has shown weaknesses in generation and protection systems, with each blackout exposing a different vulnerability of the grid.

Generation and transmission must grow to support a growing economy and energy transition. Distribution infrastructure requires major upgrades too — on one side to support rooftop solar, where transformer capacity has become a major bottleneck, and on the other, to support the mass adoption of electric vehicles already on the way.

The flawed process leading to a flawed outcome and opposition