State Minister for Power, Energy and Mineral Resources Aninda Islam Amit said on Wednesday that the country’s electricity situation will see visible improvement within the next 15 days.
He assured that the government is making all-out efforts to ensure that the suffering faced by the public in August due to electricity and gas shortages is not repeated in September.
The state minister made these remarks during a parliamentary question-and-answer session in the National Parliament on Wednesday in response to a supplementary question from Chapainawabganj-3 constituency Member of Parliament (MP) Md Nurul Islam. The parliamentary session was presided over by Speaker Hafiz Uddin Ahmad.
Earlier, MP Nurul Islam pointed out that load-shedding is lasting for eight to 10 hours daily in various parts of the country, including his constituency. He claimed that the power deficit in the country had reached 3,700 megawatts (MW) on 9 August, which was the highest in the last 55 years.
Under these circumstances, he inquired about the government’s immediate plans to generate an additional 3,700 MW to 4,000 MW of electricity, and the timeframe within which the situation would normalise.
In response, state minister said, “We do not want to hide the actual truth behind mere rhetoric. There is no hesitation in admitting that the people of Bangladesh are currently in distress due to the recent supply situation of electricity and gas.”
Attributing the current power crisis to long-standing wrong policies, the state minister noted that Prime Minister Tarique Rahman had also expressed his regrets to the public for the situation.
Amit explained that the country’s gas-based power plants have a total generation capacity of approximately 12,000 MW. To utilise this capacity fully, a daily supply of about 1,900 million cubic feet of gas is required.
However, the current supply, combining domestic production and LNG imports, stands at only 2,300 to 2,700 million cubic feet.
Since boosting electricity generation poses a risk of disrupting the gas supply to industrial and residential sectors, the government has to supply gas by maintaining a balance among three sectors: power, industry, and households.
He further disclosed that a 616 MW unit of the Payra power plant is currently closed due to technical faults, while another unit of the Matarbari power plant with the same capacity has been shut down for maintenance.
Additionally, while the country is supposed to receive 1,600 MW of electricity as per the agreement with India’s Adani Group, it is currently getting about 900 MW during the day and approximately 1,100 MW in the evening.
He also mentioned that a major gas supply crisis arose previously after an LNG Floating Storage and Regasification Unit (FSRU) became dysfunctional, though it has since been repaired and put back into operation.
To boost generation, efforts are being made to run furnace oil-based power plants at their maximum capacity, Amit said. Pointing out that a massive amount of dues was owed to the owners of these private power plants, the state minister revealed that the Ministry of Finance recently allocated Tk6,000 crore to tackle the crisis. This fund is being utilised to import fuel and increase power generation.
He expressed hope that the situation would improve once the shut units of the Payra and Matarbari power plants are restarted and the fuel supply is normalised. “We hope the situation will improve within the next 15 days.
We are making all-out efforts to ensure that the suffering the people of Bangladesh had to endure in August is at least not repeated in September,” he added.
To address the energy crisis in the long run, the government is undertaking initiatives such as rooftop solar, Amit said. He announced that a new policy on rooftop solar has been adopted, allowing households and institutions to generate solar power on their rooftops to meet their own requirements and sell the excess electricity to the national grid.
With these measures, including the rooftop solar initiative, the state minister expressed optimism that the public would not have to face a similar power crisis in the coming summer.
