The Bangladesh Energy Regulatory Commission (BERC) has fixed up the rate of electricity for “Q” categories (for industry) at Taka 13.88 to TK 14.99 per unit on Monday. The ‘Q’ category consumers will get uninterrupted electricity for 24 hours and initially the distributing agencies will provide connection only to the industries. “We create the new category ‘Q” in tariff structure as PDB said that there were 500 MW of power which was inoperative as its production cost was huge, PDB is interested to supply these amount to the industrial consumers primarily, those wants to pay high tariff for uninterrupted supply,” BERC chairman told the conference.
The distributing agencies will buy the power at a rate of Tk 8.10 to Tk 9.70 per unit, Sayed Yusuf Hossain, Chairman BERC announced at the press conference at BERC Bhaban.
The interested consumer will have to pay the installation cost of transformer (if necessary), feeder and line, however, the distributing agencies will supply power to the “Q” categories consumers from June 1, Yusuf said.
Earlier, BERC held a public hearing in this regard with the stakeholders.
Criticizing the initiative, Professor Samsul Alam during the hearing said that this type of initiative will create instability and disparity in the society.
“Government should think about all and equal solution to all,” he added.
However, the number of industrial consumers is 2, 01698.
“PDB needs to spend TK 20 to 24 crores in a day to produce power from the fuel run plants, however, the finance ministry is not ready to pay these huge amount of subsidy in power sector, PDB had at least seven liquid fire power plants that’s were inoperative due to fuel, if ‘Q’ category will make it operative then it will help PDB to make the investment fruitful,” BERC chairman said.
According to the announcement consumers would have to pay TK 13.88 for 132 KV line, TK 14.45 would have to pay for 33 KV line and TK 14.99 would have to pay for 11 KV line.
The Power division on April 9 has decided to supply uninterrupted electricity to the industries those are ready to pay within TK 16 for per unit of electricity, which is the production cost of electricity that has been produces from the liquid fuel based power plants.
At present the per unit cost of electricity for small industries is TK 6.02, for off-peak hours it is 5.11 and for peak hours it is Tk 7.33 for per unit.
For big industries, per unit cost of electricity is Tk 5.90. The flat rate is Tk 5.16 and during off-peak hours it is Tk 8.08.
According to the PDB, the per unit cost of electricity (on an average) is Tk 6.68, however the cost of fuel fired plants is Tk 16.
PDB is now producing around 4700-5700 MW of electricity, however, there is around 2000 MW gap between supply and demand.
According to the PDB, in its short and medium term plan it installed around 17 liquid fuel based rental power plant, the most of the plants are now inoperative, now PDB is trying to make it operative, so PDB make this category, Professor Alam said.
-With The Independent input
