The post Telecom, internet service interrupted due to power failure appeared first on Dhaka Mirror.
]]>The failure of the electricity grid is causing interruption telecommunication and internet services throughout the country
The Association of Mobile Telecom Operators of Bangladesh (AMTOB) released a related statement on Tuesday (October 4), outlining the risks of disruption brought on by a power outage.
Due to the failure of the national power grid, telecommunications services may be disrupted in some parts of the country. We apologize for the inconvenience, read the statement.
Additionally, subscribers also reported issues with mobile internet and SMS services.
Power outages have hit several places in the country’s central and southeastern region – including capital Dhaka, Chattogram and Sylhet – due to a collapse in the national grid.
“Electricity supply to the country’s central and southeastern region came to a halt at around 2pm Tuesday (4 October),” said Dhaka Electric Supply Company Ltd (Desco) Managing Director (MD) Md Kausar Ameer Ali.
When contacted, Bangladesh Power Development Board’s (BPDB) Southern Region Chief Engineer Rezaul Karim said that Dhaka, Mymensingh, Sylhet and Cumilla have been entirely blacked out due to a failure in the national grid’s eastern part.
Rezaul Karim, who is unsure of what caused the power outage said all units of BPDB’s southern region are busy restoring connectivity.
The BPDB’s Sales and Distribution Division-4’s Facebook page reports that the blackout took place at 2:02 PM owing to low frequency.
According to the Facebook post, it will take considerable time for the electricity situation to return to normal. National grid and power plant employees are currently trying to restore the connection.
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]]>The post Irrigation over, power cut not yet appeared first on Dhaka Mirror.
]]>Although the extra need for power for Boro season irrigation is over, the level of load shedding remains unchanged due to the authorities’ financial inability to operate many idle rental power plants.
A top official of the Power Development Board (PDB) said although the irrigation phase for cultivation of Boro paddy ended on May 1, the demand for electricity remains the same due to hot weather. Irrigation required up to 1,500 megawatts of extra power.
Consequently, power outages that began in March are taking place as before across the country. In the capital, power outages almost every alternate hour continue when the demand for electricity is the highest because of hot weather.
With the mercury shooting up to 38 to 40 degrees Celsius in different areas of the country, people are consuming more power to run fan and air conditioners. But due to load shedding which is taking place six to 10 times a day at places, these cannot be used as required.
“I wake up every night around 3 to 4 am, sweating in my bed,” said Mohammad Kamal of Green Road in the capital. “I always thought since the demand for power is quite low at night, its supply would be normal. But in our area, power supply goes off every alternate hour,” he added.
A resident of Uttara, Rumman, said, “We bought an air conditioner last week. We managed to run it for a while. But most of the time, it serves only as a showpiece while we sweat.”
From old Dhaka to Gulshan, the situation is almost the same. Those who turned to using generators or IPS can, however, run their fans during the hot and humid hours, but those who entirely depend on the national grid for power supply are in a miserable condition.
The load shedding of power has also affected water supply as the Wasa cannot operate its water pumps non-stop to ensure in many areas of the capital. Wasa sources said around half of the water pumps cannot be normally due to the load shedding.
The PDB says if it had enough funds, it could have operated all the rental power plants and bring down the level of load shedding to a tolerable level.
Many rental plants that sell power to the PDB at a high price is sitting idle since it cannot provide them with liquid fuel — diesel and heavy fuel oil.
As a result, the PDB says, it is supplying around 5,200 MW power against the demand for 6,700 MW across the country.
The PDB mentioned that it could have supplied 6,000 MW power now if it had enough funds to provide the required liquid fuel, the price of which more than doubled in the last two years when it (PDB) had planned and forecast how it would handle the summer requirement of power in 2012.
“We ran out of the Tk 5,200-crore subsidy several months back. The government is raising power tariff to cover our deficit, but the move should have been initiated much earlier so that we did not have to depend much on the subsidy,” said a top PDB official.
“Two years ago, when we started implementing a large number of fuel- based rental power projects, the price of heavy fuel oil (HFO) was just Tk 26 a litre. Now, its price has gone up to Tk 60 a litre. Had the price remained low, we would not have faced the power crisis,” he said.
Had the fuel price remained Tk 26 a litre, the PDB would have required Tk 4,000 crore in subsidy. Prior to the last fiscal year’s budget, the fuel price rose to Tk 40 a litre, forcing the PDB to seek Tk 9,000-crore subsidy. Of this, the government gave Tk 5,200 crore with the remaining to be collected by raising power tariff.
But now, with the HFO price rising sharply, the PDB has estimated it would need Tk 1,2000 crore in subsidy in the next fiscal year.
PDB sources said due to the fund crunch, they have stopped fuel supply to several rental plants. They (PDB) are paying these idle plants a “capacity charge” for not buying power from them. Capacity charge is roughly one fifth of the power tariff for each of these plants.
The easiest way to increase power generation would have been an increase of gas supply to power plants. Power from natural gas-fired plant is the cheapest power in the country. But due to persistent gas crisis for many years now, close to a 1,000 MW power cannot be generated.
In the last three years, the Petrobangla failed to significantly increase gas supply.
Meanwhile, the PDB is striking a deal with Australian company Santos to buy gas from a new small gas field close to the offshore Sangu field. Santos would supply only 20 million cubic feet a day (mmcfd) gas to the PDB at a rate of $4.5 per mmcfd once the higher authorities approve the purchase proposal.
“This gas will help us run partially one of the two 210MW Raozan power plant units. Santos will be able to supply it just for two years. We are hoping that during this period, the company will make similar discoveries,” a PDB high official said.
Courtesy of The Daily Star
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]]>The post Rajshahi reels from power outage appeared first on Dhaka Mirror.
]]>People in Rajshahi zone including the boro growers in the Barind region have been experiencing eight to 12 hours of load-shedding every day as the zone is facing power shortfall of about 50 percent megawatt (MW).
The distribution units were provided with 277 MW power yesterday against the daily demand of 600 MW, which amounted to a 323 MW shortfall, said Power Development Board (PDB) officials.
The picture is almost similar on any other day, they said.
Abdur Rouf, superintendent engineer of PDB, Rajshahi zone, said all peaking power plants and oil-based power plants remain shut during daytime to reduce expenses.
Meanwhile, load shedding has risen significantly in the city since early March, which the PDB officials attribute to supplying uninterrupted power to irrigation machines at boro fields.
However, Quamruzzaman, a boro grower of Tanore, said they have not been receiving continuous supply of power.
“We need to keep boro fields under water continuously but we only get water from deep tube-wells after every 15 days because of power crisis,” he said.
Enamul Haque, a deep tubewell operator of Karimpur village of Mundumala, said they witness load shedding 10 to 12 hours daily. Some 130 bighas of land under his deep tube-well scheme gets water every 15 days.
The load shedding causes immense sufferings to people in Rajshahi, Natore, Naogaon, Chapainawabganj, Pabna, Sirajganj, Bogra, and Joypurhat districts.
“I was forced to buy an IPS for Tk 20,000 for my daughter who is taking the HSC examinations this year,” said Hafizul Islam, a businessman of Miapara in Rajshahi city.
He said sometimes he cannot charge the IPS properly due to frequent power cuts.
The zone is getting 140 MW of power while the daily demand is around 350 MW.
Frequent load shedding caused water crisis in many areas while healthcare including surgical operations at Rajshahi Medical College Hospital are being greatly hampered.
-With The Daily Star input
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]]>The post Experts for microgrids to ease power woes appeared first on Dhaka Mirror.
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As frequent power outages and government inability to increase electricity production have gripped mass psyche, one element is, perhaps, eluding all eyes. That is delay in adoption of a digital power monitoring system is costing the country hard, which could have otherwise saved up to 500 Mw every day. Power generation, on a daily basis, now stands at between 4,000-4,500Mw. In the absence of an advanced monitoring system, power theft, without paying proper premiums on current rates, has become a common occurrence. Power company employees, themselves, are involved in malpractices like signing on installation papers with lower load values, while actually offering double or more power loads, by taking bribes.Experts have long been saying that a digital microgrid system, using smart meters, could quantify the exact reading going through the power lines, thus illegal links could be located and stopped, but no step has been taken in this regard. A digital microgrid system would regulate the current zones better, reduce effects of power cuts and provide stability to the power sector, said Sanwar A Sunny, a Bangladeshi expatriate who has worked as an associate project manager at the renewable energy office of the US department of energy.
The smart digital grid system, explained Sunny, who founded the Bangladesh Green Building Council (BGBC), is a digital microgridding procedure, divides power distribution zones into residential and commercial zones. So the entire zone does not lose power during a power cut, Sunny said, adding that the zone, itself, should use mixed land usage and better urban planning.
He said the current power lines incur losses in transmission, as they are not microgrids, the circuit breakers at grid coordinates are not enough to make the grids smaller and manageable. “This is why, if one of the sections have a faulty operation, a larger area faces to a black-out”, he said, adding that a smart grid with small, relatively cheap, locally made radio transmitters, operating remotely in unlicensed radio bands, using two-way real-time communication technology could change the scenario.
It could transmit coded instructions from the central board (electricity offices) to the circuit breakers in selected coordinates of the microgrid sub-stations and could maintain multiple power flow lines with automated control and digital metering, he added.
“The individual grids could themselves be resource efficient, with their own waste management and generation capabilities and reduced need for transportation”, he opined.
Sunny said that feed-in tariffs (FIT) would also be possible, as the energy usage could be monitored remotely and private power generation and energy efficient entities could be offered rebates and incentives. “This will also expedite investments in this sector, create job opportunities for engineering graduates and technicians, and ease pressures on the government”, he added.
Dr Saiful Haque, president of Bangladesh Solar Energy Society and professor of the Renewable Energy Institute (REI) at Dhaka University (DU), said that digital microgrid could integrate renewable energy and private power generation, monitoring how much power is produced and used.
There are many off-the-shelf and customised ways of adding supply from private power and renewable energy generation sources, into the grid, he said, adding that various private companies have been designing such solutions, but policy problems, rather than technological limitations, have been hindering their implementation in the country.
Siddique Zobair, senior consultant of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the German government-run agency for technical cooperation for sustainable development, told The Independent that incorporating smart grid systems, with renewable energy generation, would be a good step towards reducing system loss. GIZ is currently working as consultant, on renewable energy sector, to the power division of the ministry of power.
“But the problem is, apart from theft from the power-grid, more than 12 per cent of daily output (about 600Mw) is lost due to old transmission lines. If the lines aren’t changed, then only the smart grid system cannot curb system loss”, he said. About FIT for smart grids with renewable energy, Zobair said the concept should be made clear to the public, before the government implements it. “FIT is the preferential rate paid for electricity fed back into the national grid, from a renewable energy generator,” he said, adding that more than 64 countries adopted FIT, in an effort to find a solution to power crises.
“Even India has a feed-in tariff policy these days. Under their policy, a solar-system installer can sell electricity to the national grid at a slightly higher price. This encourages urban dwellers to install solar energy generation systems and feed the extra electricity to the grid lines”, he said. But, for better monitoring of the entire process, smart microgrid systems have to be installed.
Taposh Kumar Roy, additional secretary of ministry of power, power division, told The Independent that the government still has not decided anything about installing smart microgrid systems, to curb power loss.
Courtesy of The Independent
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