Anisul Islam Noor :
Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB) has set a plan to generate 10,500MW power in Boro irrigation season from January to May aiming to boost rice production in the country, sources said.
To meet the additional electricity demand, the government has planned to generate up to 5,900MW power from fuel oil-fired power plants, which was 3,400MW during the previous season.
“We placed demands for 679,000 tonnes of diesel and 800,000 tonnes of furnace oil to feed the fuel oil-fired power plants during Boro irrigation season,” BPDB Chairman Engineer Khaled Mahmud told The New Nation on Tuesday.
He said that the dependence on fuel oil-fired power plants would be increased mainly due to shortage of supply of domestic natural gas.
Rural Electrification Board Chairman Moin Uddin said that the demand for electricity in the country’s rural areas would be approximately 6,000MW, which was 5,200MW in the previous irrigation season.
When asked about the increasing cost of power generation, the BPDB chairman said that the cost of electricity generation, even using expensive fuel oil-fired plants, was acceptable than ‘no electricity.’
Citing the grounds for increasing power generation costs due to growing dependence on fuel oil-fired power plants, the Bangladesh Energy Regulatory Commission (BERC) raised the average retail price of electricity by 81.91 per cent, up from Tk 3.76 per kilowatt-hour or unit to Tk 6.84, in nine phases between March 2010 and December 2017.
Now the country’s available power generation capacity is 13,147MW, of which fuel oil-fired plants’ combined power generation capacity stands at 3,900MW, according to the power board’s daily generation reports.
Of the total power generation capacity, the gas-fired power plants with 8,161MW available capacity need up to 1,841 million cubic feet of natural gas while they get only 920 mmcfd, according to Petrobangla reports.
The power board chairman said that the dependence on liquid fuel would decrease significantly if they do not get gas supplies at a rate of 1,300 mmcfd or more.
The BPDB Chairman said that the issue of gas supply capacity against demand at the power stations would be settled at a separate meeting, yet to be scheduled.
He said that officials of the Railway and the Shipping Ministries assured of facilitating transportation of fuel oils from Chittagong to the North-Bengal smoothly.
Petrobangla supplies 2,677 mmcfd gas against demand for at least 3,700 mmcfd, hampering power generation and industrial productions as well as cooking at nearly 13 lakh households.
