Chairman's Message
Electricity to every house may be a political vision, but I wanted to practically implement it using the entrepreneurial skills of people, collective know-how and management skills of our team of engineers and managers. We incorporated ENCO (Pvt) Limited in 1996, to develop stand alone, off-grid micro hydro power projects in remote villages with the collective contributions of donor funds, company revolving fund, technical know-how of the company for manufacturing micro scale turbines and load controllers, collected fund from beneficiaries, sweat equity of village community and our entrepreneurial and management skills to make impossible things possible with collective effort and putting things together with stringent time targets. It is due to motivated and visionary team culture, we have shown the entire world some successful rolling models of micro hydro projects, social development, empowerment of village, and independent but inter-dependent social structure which rally round a hydro power project built by collective effort. These successful rolling models led us to get world reputation from the World Bank and United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). Now we are replicating our technical and management know-how in East African countries, Rwanda and Burundi through UNIDO and through government contracts for design and build of stand-alone mini grids electrified by local micro/ mini hydro power projects.
With the experience of village hydro projects through ENCO and joint venture partnerships with some investors for grid connected mini hydro projects, we incorporated Hydro Power International (Pvt) Limited in June 1999, for undertaking design and build contracts of much larger scale projects of grid connected mini hydro power projects with long term power purchase agreements with the utility, Ceylon Electricity Board. We always negotiated for equity partnership in the grid connected power companies, as our inputs are immense and risk bearing which cannot only be quantified as consultancy cost and project management cost. We provided diversified inputs to the project in terms of, conceptual designs by analyzing the terrain which is the architect's job for building construction, complete risk assessment, risk evaluation, risk mitigation, bank loan negotiation, government approvals, value addition due to our credibility and trust worthiness, procurement of machinery, all designs and BOQ preparation, and complete water to wire solution by implementing the project at the lowest cost. We have made sure that all of our projects have a payback period of less than four years, and investor IRR of more than 20%.
We maintain extremely good credibility with all our banks who funded our projects and never a bank loan went over due even for a one month, so that banks bring us projects and good investors. During the first ten years of operation, we have built up a good investing partners, good engineering and management team, and even crossed the borders of Sri Lanka to do competitive business in African countries.
Since 2005, ENCO (Pvt) Limited undertook design and build contracts in Rwanda as development partners of UNIDO, and Ministry of Infrastructure of Government of Rwanda awarded a design and build contracts for eight hydro power projects in 2006. Government of Burundi also awarded us a hydro power contract in 2007. We have a separate arm in Rwanda and Burundi for project development, apart from our head office staff in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Being an academic, it is my obligation to divulge the know-how and contribute to the national development, so that I teach at university of Moratuwa, make presentations in most of the domestic conferences, and represented the country in international conferences. I was the president of Small Hydro Power Developers Association from 2004 to 2008 and acted as a pressure group and assisted policy making bodies to implement a national policy in renewable energy development.
We have expanded our legs in to Solar power and sanitary ware manufacturing. Our Sanitary ware manufacturing company, RSL Ceremics (Pvt) Limited , a fully owned subsidiary of Hydro power International, is the first company in Sri Lanka to manufacture ceramic sanitary ware. We seek possibilities of other renewable energy development in near future, such as dendro power ( fuel wood/ paddy husk ) , wind power, Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, and fuel cell technology
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