The Mai Cascade Hydropower Project will be feeding 7 MW of electricity to the national grid within a month, said Sanima Mai Hydropower Company. It added that a dry test of the power had been completed successfully.

In October, the Mai Khola Hydropower Project began feeding 22 MW to the national grid. The Mai Cascade Hydropower Project will be using the same platform used by Mai Khola to evacuate power.

“We are expecting to evacuate power to the national grid within a month,” said Subarna Das Shrestha, chief executive officer of the company. “We will be conducting a wet test for three weeks and then start the process of power evacuation.” 

The addition of 7 MW of energy in the national grid is expected to provide some respite to the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) to manage the load in the Eastern Region. 

According to the NEA, there is a big issue related to voltage in the eastern part of the country. The 22 MW of power from Mai Khola which was recently added to the national grid has helped NEA manage the load and voltage, and the coming 7 MW will provide further leeway.   

According to Shrestha, the project will be connected to the national grid within the stipulated time as there is no issue related with the transmission line for power evacuation. “In fact, we could have completed the project by now. Several snags like shortage of fuel and equipment due to the blockade in the Tarai have caused some delay,” Shrestha said. The 22 MW is being evacuated through a 132 kV transmission line built under the first phase of the Kabeli corridor project. The corridor will feed 90 MW of electricity generated by nine projects into the national grid. The Kabeli corridor, which was expected to be completed by July last year, has encountered time overruns due to various problems. 

Sanima Mai had constructed an 11-km-long power line on its own to evacuate the energy while the NEA erected a 34.5-km transmission line to transfer the energy to its Ilam substation. The NEA had been planning to complete the first phase of the transmission line by December 2014, but it took another nine months to complete the project.

According to the project, 70 percent of the financing came from non-resident Nepalis, 10 percent from locals and 20 percent from the general public through an initial public offering. The feasibility study of the Mai Hydropower Project was undertaken by Sanima Hydropower in June 2006. The project was proposed as a daily peaking run-of-the-river project with an installed capacity of 22 MW. 

The construction of Mai Hydropower started in January 2011. Likewise, work on the Mai Cascade Hydropower Project began in July 2013.