EARLY summer days have started tolling the knell of power outage, which has already spanned up to 10 hours in places in the past few days, as power generation lags far behind the demand. The Power Grid Company of Bangladesh estimates the overall outage in evening peak hours at 853MW, with 13.19GW having been produced against the demand for 14.04GW. The overall outage doubled to 1.73GW in the afternoon on April 3, with 11.98GW having been produced against the demand for 13.80GW. The situation could be worrying as the summer now tends to span for months, well into November, leaving potential negative effect on public health and agricultural production. The Power Cell anticipates that the demand this month could peak to 17.50GW. In such a situation, the installed power generation capacity of about 26.84GW could have solaced both citizens and the government. But it would not so happen. In 2023, a half of the generation capacity remained unused, adding to capacity payment, which the government pays to rental and independent power producers irrespective of the power produced. In the past summer, power outage exceeded 3GW mainly because of fuel shortage, when temperature crossed 40 degrees Celsius, on days especially between April and June.
There are fears that the summer this year could be much vexing as people would face hot days and dark nights although power prices have gone up by 300 per cent since 2009 and the power generation capacity has increased by 500 per cent. While people would suffer more in the hot, humid summer days with power outage set to intensify, farmers are worried that frequent power outages or outages for long periods would harm the crops if irrigation could not be properly done. Energy experts have already sounded warnings for the government about the worsening situation because the shortage of dollar that has severely constrained the government since about 2022, advising the government to take some measures to attend to the situation. The government says it has plans to tackle the situation, but any improvement appears hardly forthcoming because of the shortage of both dollar and fuel. The government has since 2009, when the government resorted to rental and quick rental power plants under the protection of an indemnity law, paid Tk 100 billion in capacity payment by way of a flawed power energy policy pursued; and investments in the power sector is estimated to have been $33 billion, including the capacity payment. Such a huge amount of money that the government has spent on the oft-vaunted energy security appears to have, in effect, failed to ensure power for people.
Experts believe that that government鈥檚 way of paying for the power that rental and independent power producers do not produce has been a device to transfer public money into private pockets and the government鈥檚 fixation about an ever-increasing installed generation capacity has only compounded the matter. The government鈥檚 increasing installed power generation capacity without adequately arranging for fuel that would run the plants has only bled the economy. An early course correction is badly in order.
