New power connection
Four lakh applications pending
At least four lakh applications have been filed with five power distribution companies seeking new electricity connections.
The new connections would need additional 1,200MW electricity while the country is facing at least 2,000MW power shortfall against the existing demand.
Experts and officials in the power sector said that such high volume of additional power demand would compel the distribution companies to increase load shedding on the existing consumers.
Mohammad Abdus Sobhan, managing director of Dhaka Power Distribution Company (DPDC) said, present power demand in the DPDC area is 1150MW to 1200MW whereas the supply was on average 650MW.
If the production grows significantly, the load shedding situation would remain the same. But if the increment of production rate cannot follow the demand rate, power outages would increase further.
Ijaz Hossain, an expert on power sector and Professor of Chemical engineering department of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) said that the coming power demand would not be met by the projected additional power generation.
Officials of Rural Electrification Board said, 60,124 new electricity connections were pending in 70
PBSs before April, 2010. Consumers already paid money for their connections, demanding 186.295MW power.
Another 280,762 more applications have been submitted to the PBSs across the country from April to September this year, but the authorities did not receive money with the applications since the process has been stopped through a government order.
Power secretary Mohammad Abul Kalam Azad said that this huge number of electricity connections would not be provided immediately.
‘We are considering maintaining equilibrium between production and demand for new electricity connections. We are not going to provide electricity connections to all consumers immediately. Applicants will get connections step by step considering the improvement in power generation’, he added.
But this would breed nepotism in power distribution companies and sufferings to the consumers, said concerned experts.
Bangladesh Power Development Board chairman ASM Alamgir Kabir at a workshop on October 7 said that new power connections would be conditional while one would have to meet 5 percent of his/her demand by own initiated solar power, considering the consumer’s affordability.
Concern experts said that such provision would not bring any solution to the huge power shortfall since solar power is still much expensive and needed much space that is not available in urban areas.
Apart from these, the present government has initiated establishing high cost short term Quick Rental Power plants of a total capacity of 1633MW in the private sector to solve the power crisis on a fast track basis.
Former Power Cell Director General BD Rahmatullah was critical of the rental power plant projects, saying that these plants would not come into production in time and fail to produce electricity sufficiently as they would use run down plants.
The government should have emphasized on improving the efficiency of the old power plants that would give additional 700MW power on the national grid within six months at a cost of Tk. 1,500 million, he said.
Rahmatullah put stress on strengthening oil, gas and mineral resources corporation (Petrobangla) for exploration and extraction gas from potential blocks for ensuring safe and cheap primary fuel for power generation.
With regard to utilization of coal in Bangladesh context, he proposed to use coal gasification method rather than underground or open pit mining.
