Dhaka, April 24, 2017 (EP) - The government has fallen behind its contingency plan of setting up 10 furnace oil-based power plants to meet the power demand.
It approved only seven plants early this month out of the 10, which the government had planned to set up as an alternative due to delay in bringing the base load power plants now under implementation, particularly the coal-based plants.
The government had also considered the oil-based plants due to low price of fuel oil in the international market.
But proposals for three of the planned plants, though approved by Bangladesh Power Development Board, were not placed before the cabinet committee on public purchase that approved the seven others.
These three -- each having 115M W of capacity -- were proposed to be set up at Jamalpur, Shantahar and Bagerhat.
BPDB had sent the proposals of the 10 to the Power Division for placing before the cabinet body and awarding contracts to the lowest qualified bidders.
But the Power Division sent only seven of the proposals for consideration by the cabinet body and forwarded one proposal for the Jamalpur 115 MW plant to the Prime Ministers Office for necessary permission to hold renegotiation.
The fate of two other bids evaluated as the lowest bidder – a consortium of EXCEL Infrastructure and Energis Corporation Limited -- for each 115 MW plants at Shantahar and Bagerhat is hanging with the Power Division.
When asked about why the proposals were not placed before the cabinet body, BPDB officials did not respond or tried to avoid the questions while the bidders expressed their inability to talk. However, an official of BPDB, on condition of anonymity, said: “There is no legal option for renegotiation with the already lowest evaluated bidders.”
The tariffs quoted for Shantahar and Bagerhat plants were the lowest among the ten power projects. The levelized tariff for Shantahar plant is 10.1003 cent/kwh and that of the Bagerhat is 9.9096cents/kwh.
Energis Power Corporation is a subsidiary of Shasha Denims Limited, a listed company of share market. As the news spread around that the company has been awarded two power plants, its share price went up. But the price started falling when the proposals did not receive the approval.
Liquid fuel now contributes about 28% of the power generation now in fuel mix. Some plants with combined capacity of 500 MW are at different stages of implementation. The ten (100MW+15%) furnace oil based power plants construction is the latest initiative.
There are allegations that efforts are there for awarding the two contracts for Shantahar and Bagerhat power plants to companies other than the lowest evaluated and BPDB recommended bidder Energis Power Corporation.
When asked about it, the BPDB Chairman did not agree to make comment.
But a senior official of the Power Division mentioned that they have not received any instruction whether the two proposals would be further reviewed or would be sent to the cabinet committee in future.
