Staff Correspondent
Power outage at daytime, in addition to the outages during evening hours, has become frequent for two days, especially in the cities, as people started using air-coolers and fans with weather warming up and power generation dropping further.
Power Development Board officials said power outage in urban areas at daytime had also increased because of increased supply of electricity to rural areas for irrigation in boro farming season.
Most urban areas faced at least two hours of power outage during daytime on Tuesday as the Dhaka Power Distribution Company supplied around 1,100MW of power to the city and adjacent areas against the demand for about 1,400MW.
The power board’s generation came down to around 2,930MW Tuesday noon as two power units — a 70MW unit at Mymensingh and the 20MW Bogra rental power plant — tripped Monday night.
The official countrywide demand for power during daytime is around 3,600MW, although the actual demand for electricity should be well over 4,000MW, the officials said.
‘Power generation declined by 120MW today [Tuesday] because of closure of two units and gas shortage, resulting in the increase in power outages at daytime along with the usual power outages during evening hours,’ said a power board official
The frequent power outages during evening peak hours began a week ago as the board’s generation dipped to around 3,200MW because of the tripping of the 360MW Haripur power plant against the official demand for around 4,150MW.
‘As weather is getting warmer, the demand for electricity in cities is also increasing as people have started using air-coolers. As most offices use air-coolers the demand for electricity goes up,’ said a DPDC official, adding the dip in generation on Tuesday made the situation worse.
PDB officials are worried and are feeling ‘unlucky’ that the electricity generation, which was more than 3,600MW in December when weather was cold, came down below 3,200MW. ‘We need to increase power generation now. But we are facing extremely tough time as generation is dipping. It is sheer bad luck that a number of power units have tripped and we are also faced with gas shortage,’ said an official, partly blaming the Power Division for lack of monitoring.
PDB officials fear if the power generation continued to be around 3,200MW, there would be severe power outages later this month when summer would fully set in.
Energy officials said it was unlikely that the gas supply to the power board could be increased in the near future as the country’s daily gas shortages have reached around 700 million cubic feet.
The power board receives around 630 million cubic feet of gas against the demand for 850mmcfd for all the power plants.
‘Officially, the demand for gas now is around 2050mmcfd.
But I think the demand has shot up to 2500mmcfd if we consider the unmet demand of all power plants, fertiliser plants, industries and CNG filling stations against Petrobangla’s production of gas, which is around 1830mmcfd,’ said a high official of the energy division.
He, however, said gas supply might increase by around 100mmcfd in the next six months which might provide some relief.
Courtesy: newagebd.com
