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500mw shortfall as plants shut down

Staff Correspondent
Following the shutdown of several power plants, the country has been undergoing a steady power shortfall of at least 500 megawatts (mw) for the last one week, with no immediate respite in sight.
Power Development Board (PDB) sources said that different plants generating over 900mw now remained shutdown due to various reasons. As a result, the PDB is now supplying 3,251 mw of power against a power demand of 3750 mw during the peak hours yesterday.
PDB allocated a 100 mw load
shedding for Dhaka in the evening while the day time power supply to the capital, which consumes more than one third of total demand, was uninterrupted.
However, due to line faults, system over-loads and other glitches in Desa (Dhaka Electric Supply Authority) and Desco (Dhaka Electric Supply Company), different areas of the capital faced long hours of load shedding, Desa sources said.
PDB sources pointed out that the level of load shedding will somewhat decrease after Wednesday when one of the plants, now shut down, resumes operation.
PDB says two 50 mw units of the Kaptai hydropower plant have been shut down recently due to a shortage ofwaterattheplantsite.
The Ghorashal units no. 3 and 6, each generating 210 mw, had to be shut down for urgent maintenance work recently. Of these, unit 3 will resume power generation from Wednesday. Unit 6 will resume operation from August 30.
The four units ofAshuganj, which have a combined power generation capacity of 724 mw, are now producing 424 mw as two units remain shutdown.
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The first unit of 210 mw Raozan power plant is generating 150 mw of power, instead of 210 mw, due to a technical glitch.
Similarly, technical problems have reduced power production at the Haripur 100 mw plant down to a mere 27 mw.
"These shutdowns and technical problems are inevitable because these plants are running without any respite. Our power generation capacity, if all plants are running, is now 4100 mwwhich is close to the demand. We need more power plants to avoid this kind of load shedding," says a PDB official.
But there is no power plant project in the pipeline that is set to go online within the next one year.
In the last four years, the BNP government so far added only the Tongi 80 mw plant, built by Chinese company Harbin. That too is malfunctioning most of the time due to the flawed design of the plant, PDB sources say.