Power Development Board (PDB) has decided to repair and rehabilitate 12 public sector plants to generate more electricity under the “Power sector maintenance and development fund”.
“We have selected 12 power plants, including Ghorasal and Barapukuria, out of 144 units for the scheme. We would discuss the issue in our next board meeting and then forward the recommendations to Bangladesh Energy Regulatory Commission (BERC),” a PDB official said. According to PDB, most of the public sector power plants are dilapidated. “We are forced to continue production from plants with an average age between 17 to 40 years. We are unable to commission new plants or even upgrade the existing ones due to funds crunch,” the official added. On the contrary, BERC blamed the state-run power generation company of failing to utilize Tk 1,400 crore of maintenance funds. This money is over and above the budgetary allocation for the power sector. It is exclusively meant for development projects in the sector, including rehabilitation and replacement of government-run power plants.
“PDB authorities have failed to fix up a policy to use the money in the past one-and-a-half years,” a BERC official said. “We had a meeting with PDB officials on June 28 and asked them to give us a report in this regard,” he added.
The regulatory commission has also frowned upon PDB’s application for power tariff hike, saying the state-run company was already paying a monthly electricity bill of Tk 400 crore to IPPs and rental power producers.
BERC chairman Mohammad Emdadul Haque said, “We don’t like to see PDB giving the cream of its revenue to private players. We want it to strengthen its own infrastructure so as to increase production by the state-run plants.”
According to experts, private players are gaining dominance in power generation because the PDB has failed to increase production from its own plants and it also has not been able to build new units.
“The contribution of privately-owned plants to electricity generation would be 62 per cent by 2016. And the government would be forced to support them by increasing the tariff time and again,” an official said.
“This would create a serious imbalance between the cost-effective tariff structure and affordability in context of the people,” he added.
-With The Independent input
