Both for Wärtsilä and for Bangladesh, the United Ashuganj 200 MW modular power plant project is a true ground-breaker. Not only is it the first public-private partnership (PPP) in the nation’s energy sector, it will also introduce a type of co-generation plant never before seen in the country.
Furthermore, it is Wärtsilä’s largest single power plant project in Asia to date.
Chronic constraints in fuel supply, coupled
with outdated and inefficient infrastructure, have
meant that blackouts and brownouts are common in the country of 150 million.
To alleviate the problem, United Group, a
Bangladeshi conglomerate that has long been a
major player in the nation’s power industry, made
a proposal to the government in 2013 that it replace some of its old power generation equipment with a more efficient and flexible modular
co-generation system.
During the technology partner selection process, United chose Wärtsilä
based on the two companies’ past collaborative
successes as well as on Wärtsilä’s strong local
presence and world-wide track record.
The tender resulted in a PPP wherein United
owns 71% of the partnership company with the
remaining 29% controlled by the state-owned
Ashuganj Power Station Company Limited.
A core demand of the project was meeting
the government’s strict guidelines for efficiency,
said Moinuddin Hasan Rashid, Managing Director of United Enterprises & Co. Ltd.
“Most of the existing power plants in Bangladesh are extremely old ranging from 25 to 40
years,” he said. “These gas-guzzlers, as we call
them, have an operating [thermal] efficiency
around of 22 to 28%.”
The United facility, by contrast, will have a
thermal efficiency exceeding 47% when it is
completed in the first quarter of 2015. It comprises 20 of Wärtsilä’s 20V34SG gas engines,
each producing about 9.73 MW. In addition,
the new project comes with a co-generation
element, whereby the exhaust heat from the
generators is run through exhaust gas heat recovery boilers to produce steam, which turns a
turbine-generator, boosting the power output by
a further 16 MW.
A further engineering challenge involved fitting the plant on a 6.48-acre plot at the Ashuganj Power Station Complex, an area about a
third of what had initially been earmarked. Again, engineering cooperation between United
and Wärtsilä paid off, resulting in a compact
plant that still met all technical demands.
Just as crucial as being energy efficient, the
plant meets the flexibility demands of the Bangladeshi grid, which has an extremely erratic load
pattern due to weather and seasonal irrigation.
The plant’s modular set-up allows operators
to quickly change the output levels simply by
changing the number of generators used, and it
does this while maintaining the same level of efficiency all the way down to 30% power output.
This unprecedented combination of flexibility
and efficiency, Rashid said, means that the new
plant is likely to serve as a model for the country’s power sector.
