bd EnergY LinK

EDITORIAL

ACCORDING to recent press reports, about 75 per cent of natural gas is being misused at the inefficient power plants across the country causing immense loss to valuable natural resources worth huge amounts of money. As appeared in newspapers, dilapidated and old power plants are now white elephants. But due to lack of policy and fund constraints, the Power Development Board failed to take measures to replace these power plants for decades. The Haripur and Shahjibazar plants consumed 7,090 million cubic feet of natural gas in 2008 to generate 480 gigawatt per hour, but using the same quantity of gas in the state-of-the-art of gas turbine and in an aero-derivative gas turbine 683 GWh and 879 GWh of electricity respectively could have been generated, says an expert.

The PDB chairman conceded that the Ashugonj-128MW, Ghorashal-110MW and Chittagong-60MW power plants were more than quarter-century old and these plants consumed 15,604 million cubic feet of gas in 2008 to generate 1,203 GWh of electricity but using the same amount of gas one could generate more than 2,000 GWh of electricity. The average generation of electricity of steam thermal power plants under PDB is 31.5 per cent. Nowadays standard practice is to use combined cycle gas turbines when natural gas is the fuel.

Efficiency of the new CCGT plants is significantly higher than older steam thermal units, in fact, all new gas-fired power plants that PDB expects to build in the future should be CCGT. CCGT can help achieve efficiency above 50 per cent as the technology is fully commercial, and costs much less. All of Bangladesh’s gas-fired power plants under the PDB are steam thermal, the only exception being the Fenchugonj 90MW plant. PDB is for help to replace the old power plants and install efficient ones.