No end to govt bias for rental power plants

THE extension of the tenure of power purchase from four more rental plants — three for three years and the other for two — seems to only lend credence to the allegations of the Awami League government’s bias towards the controversial rental and quick rental plants. As New Age reported on Thursday, quoting the additional secretary of the cabinet division, the cabinet committee on purchase at a meeting approved a proposal placed by the power division in this regard on Wednesday. Although all the four plants are gas-based unlike many rental plants that are run on expensive fuel-oils like diesel and furnace oil, owners of which also already managed the government to ensure extensions, there are lots of questions about their efficiency in using gas, the domestic reserve of which is depleting fast. As all the rental and quick rental plants now in operation were distributed unsolicited, that too mostly among people having connections, direct and indirect, to the ruling party, allegations were rife that they were introduced more to benefit the owners than to rid the country of frequent power outages, a problem that haunts many parts of the country, especially the rural areas, even four years after the plants came into operation in 2011.
It is important to note that, as feared by experts in general, rental plants have significantly contributed to repeated increases in power tariffs, bulk and retail, in the past few years leaving consumers belonging to fixed-and low-income brackets in particular in dire straits. Key functionaries of the government, including the finance minister, who happens to have chaired the meeting that decided the matter in question, made announcement on more occasions than one in parliament since 2011that once, in line with the master plan adopted in 2010 on the power sector, base-load plants driven by cheaper fuel like coal and gas started to operate from 2013, rental plants would gradually be phased out. It was an announcement that is still far from being a reality. Even officials related to the sector admitted that none of the cheaper plants are expected to come into operation before 2018. According to experts, it was the government’s foot-dragging for mysterious reasons that mainly delayed the implementation of such projects. Meanwhile, the government has also failed to live up to its promise of overhauling the older base-load plants thus far, an initiative that would significantly help increase power generation at low rates.
Be that as it may, without sustained public pressure, the government is unlikely to make a course correction in this regard.