Power supply may improve by Saturday, says state minister

The power outages that have been happening during the peak of summer are in fact ‘load-sharing’, according to State Minister for Power Nasrul Hamid.

Senior Correspondentbdnews24.com
Published : 25 May 2017, 04:11 PM
Updated : 26 May 2017, 05:37 AM

“I’ll call this load sharing, not shedding,” he said at a press conference on Thursday, amid complaints of huge public sufferings.

The power situation is expected to improve by Saturday when supply increases, he said, adding that Bangladesh was generating over 8,000MW of electricity a day.

“We have been sharing load for the past few days. Shedding load… when there is no situation for power generation. We have been sharing power from one area with another, naturally.”

Load-shedding is different from load sharing, he said. “It’s like the difference between price adjustment and price increase.”

He listed setbacks to explain why there were still power outages even though capacity for power generation crossed 15,000MW.

“Around 400MW of power cannot be consumed because a tower fell at Meghna Power Plant. This is giving rise to these problems.”

“Our plants at Bibiyana, Ashuganj and Meghna have shut down all of a sudden. It’s

a servicing period for multiple reasons. The problems are because of this sudden shutdown.”

Maintenance work in several privately run power plants were also contributing to the power situation, he said.