Barapukuria power plant falters again
The national grid is deprived of power supply from Barapukuria 250 megawatt coal-based power plant as its two units (125 MW each) have remained closed for days.
The Unit-1 was shut down on November 10 for its scheduled overhauling while Unit-2 was closed on November 27 as experts detected a leakage in a boiler, plant officials said.
With special efforts, authorities managed to make Unit-2 operational on the night of November 30 but it had to be closed again on December 3.
The power production of the country's lone coal-based power plant built by Chinese Company CMC is badly hampered due to frequent technical glitches.
After starting power generation in 2006, the two units of the plant at Barapukuria in Dinajpur continued running for around two months when they jointly added at least 220 to 230MW power daily to the national grid, said the power plant sources.
But due to problems that occurred in the following period, the two units never ran simultaneously for long.
According to the project proposal, the plant required overhauling for every 8,000 operational hours, but it has become so weak that it is hard to operate even 2000 hours continuously, plant sources said.
Chinese experts are working for overhauling Unit-1 of the plant and it will be complete by December 20/22 when the plant will be put on test run for seven or eight days. If the rest run is completed successfully, produced power will be added to the national grid by December 29 or 30, said plant sources.
It is going to be the longest time for overhauling a unit of the plant, they said.
The unit-2 required shut down two times in last November as the boiler developed leakages, they said.
Authorities said that the power generation of Unit-2 will start within a short time.
Meanwhile, the power generation rate of both the units have gone down alarmingly. Each of the 125MW capacity plants can now produce 70 to 80MW only due to technical problems.
Barapukuria power plant earlier produced 220 to 230 MW power by burning 2000 to 2500 tonnes of coal everyday but the power production started declining despite the same coal consumption, plant officials said.
Besides, most of the time only one unit could be kept operational due to problems.
The coal-fired power plant at Barapukuria is technically more sophisticated than other gas and oil run power plants in the country but low quality machinery supplied by its Chinese contractor CMC was used in the plant, which is causing frequent trouble there, said officials seeking anonymity.
When contacted, Biswanath Haldar, chief engineer of Barapukuria Power Plant, said, "Chinese experts are trying their best to restart power production from Unit-2 within a day or two."
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