After a 17-hour forced shutdown, one unit of the Adani Power Plant in Jharkhand resumed generation at 7 pm on Saturday.
According to both Adani and Power Grid Bangladesh PLC, Unit 1 of the plant has come back into operation with 45.79 MW, against its actual capacity of 800 MW.
Officials mentioned that the generation will gradually increase from this unit.
The Adani Power Plant has two units, each with a capacity of 800 MW.
Earlier on Saturday, electricity generation from this unit had come to a halt, and another unit ceased production on April 1.
Following this, Bangladesh experienced increasing load-shedding due to the shutdown of the generation unit caused by technical faults.
Data from Power Grid Bangladesh PLC, which tracks hourly power generation and transmission statistics, reveals that the country faced its highest load-shedding of 428 MW at 3 pm on Saturday, a weekly holiday when electricity demand is typically lower than on working days.
Technical faults at Adani’s Jharkhand plant lead to increased load-shedding in Bangladesh
“This has been the highest amount of load-shedding in recent days, when power shortages typically remained between 50 and 150 MW,” said a Power Grid official.
Officials at Power Grid Bangladesh PLC and the Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB) are concerned that the shutdown of one of the largest sources of power supply may lead to further increases in load-shedding on working days.
“The extent of load-shedding may further increase on Sunday with the start of the working week,” a top official at the BPDB told UNB.
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It is assumed that, typically, the country’s rural areas in the northern districts are preferred for power cuts because several power plants there run on costly fuels like liquid petroleum, diesel, and furnace oil.
“If diesel is used, each unit of electricity costs over Tk 40, and it’s Tk 20 if furnace oil is used,” said a senior BPDB official.
Energy Adviser Dr. Fouzul Kabir Khan, however, recently assured that there would be no discrimination in load-shedding allocation. “We’ll prefer to resort to power cuts first in Dhaka city and then in other areas,” he told reporters in Chattogram.
Meanwhile, the BPDB has requested the Oil, Gas, and Mineral Resources Corporation (Petrobangla) to provide additional gas supply to power plants to boost electricity generation from local power stations.
Official data show that the country’s demand was forecasted to be 12,600 MW during daytime peak hours and 13,800 MW during evening peak hours.
Bangladesh has been importing electricity from Adani’s Jharkhand Power Plant since April 2023 under a 25-year power purchase agreement (PPA).