Power outage crops up

Staff Reporter

 

Power crisis has intensified in the country as shortfall has reached an average 1500 megawatt per day in the current month.

On Wednesday, the country’s overall electricity generation was hovering around 3698 megawatts (MW), against the demand for 5,100 MW, and power deficit reached 1,502 MW on the day,” a high official of Bangladesh Power Development Board (PDB) told The New Nation, preferring anonymity.

In Dhaka, electricity load shedding on the day was 504 MW, in Chittagong 168 MW, in Khulna 153 MW, in Rajshahi 125 MW, Barisal 29 MW and Rangpur 70 MW, according to PDB.

“Despite the government efforts to solve the power crisis, the situation has worsened further due to the demand supply mismatch,” he said.

However, gas shortage forced a number of power plants to keep away from their maximum generation capacity and it also has compelled the country to shed its actual power generation ability, the official added.

Presently the country’s 80 per cent power plants are gas fired. Now three gas consumed power plants remained inoperative due to its crisis.

These are Rawzan-2 power plant having generation capacity of 180mw and two units of Shikalbaha plant having generation capacity of 190MW in Chittagong.

Meanwhile, a total of 11 power plants could not able to utilize their full production capacity due to shortage of gas.

“The gas crisis has hit these units hard as its shortage forced them to shed an average 830MW generation during pick hour demand in the month of February,” he noted.

On this backdrop, the country is reeling under three to six hours of load shedding a day in several spells causing serious inconvenience to the household and commercial customers.

It also affects business in markets and production in factories.

However, residents of different areas in the capital were  experiencing severe power disruption as Dhaka Electric Supply Authority (DESA) was shedding about 50-60 MW of electricity daily.

Residents of Mirpur, Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Karwan Bazar, Green Road, Indira Road, Kalabagan, Tejturi Bazar, Monipuripara, Sutrapur and Tejkunipara suffered most from the outage.

PDB officials said load shedding had been resumed recently in the capital in order to divert electricity to the rural areas to support the irrigation season -2011.

More than 310,234 electricity-run irrigation pumps have come under operation in this Boro season creating an additional demand for 1400 MW power.

As per the PDB statistics, the overall power demand of the country during this Boro season reached around 5,550 MW having a supply shortage of 1,950 MW.

“We have to divert electricity from the city to the rural areas to meet the additional power prompting the authorities to have an average power cut of six to seven hours a day,” the official said.

He said the government is keen to ensure uninterrupted supply of electricity during the season so that water pumps and deep tubewells could be run smoothly for intensive irrigation in paddy fields.

Power Ministry sources said 16 new power plants with 1343MW generation capacity will come into operation by next May.

Besides, two power plants having generation capacity of 170 MW came into operation in February.

As per the government plan, the country would be free from the power shortage by the end of 2012, he said, adding, it would be able to surpass the electricity generation by seven per cent by 2013.

However, the government has initiated to implementation of a road-map for generating around 10,000 MW electricity by 2015 and half of the total generation or around 4,270 MW of electricity will be produced by high-cost diesel and furnace oil-run power plants.

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Source: The New Nation - Independent Daily