Payra thermal power plant is returning to production

After the arrival of the first ship with 40 thousand tons of coal, managing director of BCPC AM Khorshedul Alam Sankad told the media, ‘Coal has been unloaded from the first ship today. Power generation will start from tomorrow (Sunday). Coal ships will continue to arrive regularly from now on. Therefore, there is no fear for the continuation of power generation at this center.’ Patuakhali’s Payra thermal power plant is returning to power production from today due to the arrival of coal. A ship named MV Athena is staying at Payra port with 41 thousand 207 tons of coal. On Thursday around 2 pm, the Marshall Islands flag ship arrived at the Inner Anchor of Payra Port from Indonesia. Coal unloading from ships started on Friday morning. The two units of the Payra power plant have a combined production capacity of 1,320 MW. Due to lack of coal, the production of the power plant stopped completely on 5 June. In the dollar-crisis, the coal supply to the power plant was cut off due to overdue bills. Later arrangements were made to bring coal quickly. Payra thermal power plant came into production three years ago. After that, this is the first time that the production of the power plant has been completely stopped. Earlier, Bagerhat’s Rampal power plant was shut down twice due to coal shortage. Several officials of BCPC said that the center had been supplying more than 1,200 megawatts of electricity per day on an average for quite some time. On May 25, one unit of the center stopped production due to lack of coal. After that 300 to 620 MW of electricity was being produced per day from the rest of the 660 MW capacity units. It was supposed to run like this till June 2. However, the production was reduced and two additional days were run. On June 5, production stopped completely.