Electricity

I think I am finally starting to understand the electricity issues here. Nepal has more water than every country on earth save one. All of that water is running fairly quickly out of the mountains so you would think that providing hydro electricity would be a no-brainer. I can only assume that money is the culprit for this not being the case.

We are now in the middle of the dry season and the water levels in the few dams are dropping rapidly. The government has just released a new load-shedding schedule a mere two weeks after the last increase. This one brings us to 63 hours per week up from 45 hours at the beginning of December. For six days of the week the power is off for 10 hours, typically six hours in the morning and four in the evening. One day a week is the luxury day when there is only one three-hour outage. I’m sure you can imagine the frustration of not only trying to fit a shower in around this but actually getting some work done. Never mind trying to catch your favourite TV show.

We were all ecstatic a couple of weeks ago when the Finance Minister announced that he had a solution to the problem and that load-shedding would be cut in half within two months. He is pretty much the only Member of Parliament here that anyone respects and he seems like a smart guy. He has a PhD in Rural Planning (or something similar) from an American university, and is known to keep his promises. People trust this guy so when he said he had a solution, everyone bought in.

When we passed the new dam and power plant in Beshisahar on the field trip, we assumed that this was part of the solution. I don’t understand much about the technical side of this, but it appeared that the new plant has a considerable output of electricity.

Unfortunately, the dream has turned to dust. Apparently the Finance Minister recently visited Doha, Qatar and toured their power-generating plants which are all fuelled by diesel. He came home all excited about this and announced to the country that a solution was well in hand. Then he sat down and did the math. It turns out that diesel costs somewhat more in Nepal than in Qatar (gee, do you think?) and to use it here would increase electricity costs by 400%. So now we’re back to square one and I imagine that the one MP who had any credibility at all has lost it. I’m actually looking forward to the monsoon when the dams will fill up again.

A couple of positive notes: 1) my electricity bill is well under $10 per month (and likely dropping) 2) the college has just put in a generator so I can at least get work done there.

On another note, the college has a small building that they have staged like a hotel. There is a lobby and front desk downstairs as well as a couple of “hotel rooms”. There is also a suite on the second story with a living room, two bedrooms, kitchen and bathroom. There is balcony offering lovely views of the mountains when the air is clear. They use this building to train front-desk students as well as housekeeping students. They have offered the apartment to me free of charge. It is on the generator, so I would have power 24/7 (assuming they can find diesel to keep it running which is difficult at times). This is a good news, bad news situation. The good news is that I would have a gaggle of wanna-be maids coming in every day to clean my place for me. The bad news is that I would have a gaggle of wanna-be maids coming in every day to clean my place for me. I just don’t know if I could handle the lack of privacy. What if I want to lounge around in my pyjamas all day or what if the gods actually smile on me for once in this decade and send me an overnight guest? I just think that it would be difficult having the students know every detail of my private life, which they invariably would. I’ll have to give it some more thought.