Private company

Ceylon Electricity Board

Sri Lankan electricity company (1969–2026)

The Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB; Sinhala: ලංකා විදුලිබල මණ්ඩලය - ලංවිම, romanized: Lankā Vidulibala Mandalaya - Lanwima; Tamil: இலங்கை மின்சார சபை - இமிச) was a state-owned electricity company in Sri Lanka. It was a controlled utility of Sri Lanka that took care of the general energy facilities of the island. With a market share of nearly 100%, the CEB controlled all major functions of electricity generation, transmission, distribution and retailing in Sri Lanka.² Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

Industryenergy industry¹
HeadquartersColombo¹
Websitewww.ceb.lk

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Products and brands

The CEB had following subsidiaries:

Lanka Electricity Company

LTL Holdings (Pvt) Ltd

Lanka Coal Company Ltd

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Sri Lanka Energies (Pvt) Ltd (100% subsidiary of CEB)

Trincomalee Power Company Limited (Joint Venture)

From Wikipedia’s article on Ceylon Electricity Board, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.³

Controversies and legal

Controversies

Blackouts and shutdowns

In October 2010, during a test run, a fire broke out in a chimney due to clogging. Splits in the cooling system piping triggered a shutdown of the power plant. The Ceylon Electricity Board decided to institute blackouts for households and industries for three hours a day until the fault was fully repaired.

In December 2013, more leaks were discovered in the cooling system, and the CEB decided that the plant was too dangerous to operate at the moment. The CEB requested assistance from China Machinery Engineering Corporation (CMEC), and the company said that it would take about six weeks to fix the faults. After negotiations, the plant was repaired by CMEC and brought back online. A day later, it failed once more and was shut down again for six more days.

In 2014, then Minister of Power and Energy Pavithra Wanniarachchi revealed that the Norochcholai power plant had been offline for 271 days out of the 1086 days since it began operating.

On 25 February 2016, the entire country of Sri Lanka experienced a 3-hour blackout due to a bolt of lightning striking the national power grid.

On 13 March 2016, Sri Lanka experienced another 7-hour island-wide blackout due to a damaged transformer in the 220 kV substation at Biyagama. Prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe appointed a five-member committee to investigate the blackout. Due to initial suspicions of sabotage, president Maithripala Sirisena deployed troops to guard electrical installations until the investigation was completed. The CEB also reported that the outage caused Lakvijaya Coal Power Plant to fail, resulting in a loss of 900 megawatts to the national grid. On 23 March 2016, Power and Renewable Energy Minister Ranjith Siyambalapitiya notified parliament that the reason for the power outage was a lack of regular maintenance of power installations. The engineer in charge of the Biyagama Substation had previously reported that a key transformer needed maintenance; however, no repairs were made.

2019 Sri Lanka electricity crisis – In March 2019, the CEB decided to impose four-hour rolling power cuts on a scheduled basis throughout Sri Lanka after the national grid capacity failed to meet the increased demand for power due to dry climate, and due to limited power generation.

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Losses

Ceylon Electricity Board lost 25.5 billion rupees in 2011, and ran up debts of 121 billion rupees with a petroleum distributor and independent power producers.

In 2012, the CEB lost 61.2 billion rupees and the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation which supplied fuel below cost 89.7 billion rupees. To cover up the loss, the CEB increased power tariffs on a large scale. The CEB expected to get revenues of 223 billion rupees—or 45 billion rupees more than the earlier tariff—from the price hike, but subsequently lost 33 billion rupees in 2013 on total expenses of 256 billion rupees.

On 16 September 2014, after officially opening a completed $1.35 billion Chinese-financed 900 MW coal power plant project, then-incumbent president Mahinda Rajapaksa addressed the nation claiming that electricity bills would be reduced by 25% for the general population. The CEB stated that it would take about two weeks to come up with a process of creating electricity bills to reflect the reduction in prices.

Employee tax

The CEB has been accused of tax fraud by the Campaign for Free and Fair Elections (CaFFE), which has claimed that CEB had not deducted pay-as-you-earn tax from its engineers and senior staff since 2010, amounting to Rs. 3465 million. CaFFE has claimed that this amount has been recovered from the consumer instead.