Monsoon Surplus: The Electricity Trade Brief
You are a cadet on a two-week attachment to a planning cell in Kathmandu. Your directing officer asks for a one-page note before a Friday meeting with a visiting delegation. Nepal's installed hydropower capacity has crossed 3,000 MW, most of it run-of-river; generation peaks in the monsoon months of roughly June to September and falls sharply in the dry months, when the country still imports power from India. In November 2024 Nepal began exporting 40 MW to Bangladesh through the Indian grid under a tripartite arrangement. A senior officer argues that Nepal should sign long-term export contracts first and let domestic industry wait; a civilian official argues the opposite, pointing to load-shedding memories and idle factories. Your officer sets three constraints: the note is unclassified, it must fit on one page, and it must contain no claim you cannot source to a named agency. A journalist at the meeting is likely to ask: 'So is the surplus real?'
1. State the single question the note must answer, and name the figures you would refuse to put on the page until they are sourced.
Read the worked answer
The question is not 'does Nepal have surplus power?' but 'which block of energy is surplus, in which months, and what reliability does committing it to export cost domestic users?' Installed capacity and available energy are different quantities: 3,000 MW of run-of-river plant can leave a dry-season deficit while producing unusable surplus in August.
Figures I would source before Friday, each with agency and date:
- Month-by-month generation against peak demand (NEA annual report), not an annual total.
- Dry-season import volume and price per unit.
- Firm energy of the plants named in any export contract, as distinct from nameplate capacity.
- The 40 MW Bangladesh figure and the terms of the tripartite arrangement, so the note does not imply the volume is scalable.
Rule for the page: no number without a named agency and a date. Where a figure is missing, the note says 'not verified' rather than an estimate produced under deadline pressure. A one-page note that is 80 per cent sourced is usable; one that is 100 per cent confident and half-sourced is a liability at a meeting with a journalist in the room.
2. The journalist asks, 'So is the surplus real?' Write the two-sentence answer you would give, and explain what makes it honest rather than evasive.
Read the worked answer
'Nepal has a genuine surplus in the monsoon months and a deficit in the dry months; the surplus is real but seasonal, and the export contracts under discussion are sized to that window. On the public record, [X] MW is contractually committed; anything beyond that is an estimate, and I will send you the agency figure rather than guess at it now.'
Three things make this honest. First, it concedes the part that is true - a denial ('there is no surplus, it is seasonal') would be read as evasive because the questioner can see the number in the NEA report. Second, it replaces a yes/no with the distinction that actually matters, seasonality, which is the whole substance of the policy argument. Third, it separates what is committed from what is projected and commits to a follow-up with a named source. The evasive version is the one that answers a question nobody asked, at length, without a number. The dishonest version is the confident number you cannot source.
3. Which recommendation goes first on the page, and what evidence would change your mind?
Read the worked answer
First recommendation: sequence the two uses by firmness - reserve firm energy for domestic reliability, and commit only non-firm monsoon energy to export, with contracts written so that dry-season obligations do not force imports at export-linked prices.
Why this order: the cost of a dry-season industrial outage is borne by factories that are already operating below capacity, while the benefit of an export contract is a revenue margin. Until the note shows that export revenue exceeds the cost of the dry-season import it displaces, the senior officer's 'export first' position is an assertion, not a plan.
What would change my mind:
- A storage or reservoir scheme (including pumped storage) entering the commissioning schedule, which would create dry-season energy and weaken the trade-off.
- Evidence that export contracts are interruptible in the dry season rather than take-or-pay.
- Evidence that domestic demand cannot absorb the monsoon surplus at any price - idle factories that cannot run at night, for instance - which would make export the only use of the energy.
Stating the change condition on the page protects the note if the delegation includes someone who knows the sector better than the cadet writing it.