Energy woes - Nigeria , Tanzania and India !

Nigeria: Passengers Stranded, Flights Delayed as Darkness Envelops Lagos Airport

BY CHINEDU EZE, 12 MARCH 2012

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Crowds of passengers that massed at the entrance of central security search indicated that something was gravely wrong as one entered the international terminal of the Murtala Mohammed International Airport, Lagos Sunday.

This, however, occurred on a day another power outage which lasted for several hours paralysed activities at the terminal.

The passengers who were supposed to have departed to their various destinations could not be checked by security operatives because the x-ray machines and body scanners were not working.

Airlines were having difficulty trying to check in passengers with limited power supply from auxiliary sources, including the use of torchlight.

Passengers arriving and departing the airport were thrown into unnecessary suffocation at the immigration areas, the check-in area and the airline counters.

THISDAY learnt that power supply to the airport had been irregular for over a week while the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) was yet to provide solution to the problem..

Airline staff who profiled the passengers had to switch on their torch lights and cell phones for them to be able to profile them, while the immigration officers, security agents, National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) and men of the Nigerian Customs Services (NCS) had to device ways to solve the problem.

However, power supply to the airport was restored around 7p.m. to the relief of the airlines staff, passengers and security operatives.

Despite the restoration of the power supply to the terminal, the industrial air conditioning systems attached to strategic places at the airport were not functioning.

Some of the passengers spoken with, decried their experiences at the airport, saying that despite being a hub, most of the facilities, which would have made it functional were still lacking.

They, however, challenged FAAN to put the facilities in place and save the country of embarrassment.

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Tanzania: Power Cuts to Continue in Dares Salaam

BY LUDOVICK KAZOKA, 10 MARCH 2012

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SOME areas in the city of Dar es Salaam will continue to experience power cuts following a transformer breakdown that has been supplying electricity in the areas since Monday.

The transformer was located at Upanga Power Substation in the municipality of Ilala in Dar es Salaam. According to a source from Tanzania Electric Power Supply Company (Tanesco), the power rationing is temporary as the technicians are working round the clock to install a new transformer in the station.

"We have already installed a temporary transformer at Upanga Power Substation while awaiting the arrival of a new one. There will be normal power supply tonight," he said. The areas which have been affected by the power shedding include Upanga, Kimara, Kijichi, Mbagala and many others. At Upanga the problem has persisted for the last three days.

There was total blackout, according to residents in the area. Other areas including Oysterbay, Kinondoni and Kariakoo continued to experience brief power interruptions, which were a nuisance to consumers, said a concerned customer who lives at Kariakoo. The source said that the company would soon install a new transformer as the temporary one could not cope with actual work load.

He added that since its installation there has been continual fluctuation experienced in some areas. "Since the transformer could not cope with actual demand, some areas have been hit hard by power fluctuation," he said. A Kurasini resident in Temeke municipality, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the power fluctuation has damaged some electric domestic appliances.

She said that her television set got burnt when higher voltage hit it after a blackout. "We have power problems for the whole week. We have sometimes been experiencing power cuts or fluctuations," she said. A Kijichi resident told the 'Daily News on Saturday' that Kijichi has always been experiencing the power problems but the difference from last week was that power cuts came too frequently.

"You can be sure that within 24 hours you are likely to get electricity for eight hours spread over one day and night. There are frequent cuts within 24 hours," he said.

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Power crisis: 60,000-MW plans run on empty

  

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Anil Sasi : New Delhi, Tue Mar 13 2012, 03:23 hrs

Across the power sector, alarm bells are ringing, threatening to short-circuit the already unravelling growth story. Manufacturing has pulled down to its lowest in three years, export growth is petering out, while rising input costs and a significant fall in capacity utilisation across sectors have stymied hiring and investment outlook further.

At least five states have declared power holidays and another eight have load-shedding plans lined up.

An all-pervasive fuel shortage threatens to derail upcoming projects and has already spooked private sector project developers and investors. Add to this a distribution sector that is haemorrhaging cash, a widening demand-supply gap, a flagging reforms agenda, and missed generation capacity addition targets.

Result: An estimated 12,000 MW of existing capacity and 48,000 MW (fresh capacity) face the prospect of running on empty. Reflecting the seriousness of the situation, at least five crisis management meetings have been convened in the past couple of months, three of them by the Prime Minister’s Office. Each ended with broadly the same conclusion — that while a long-term solution to the power sector mess needs to be found, the villain of the piece for now is Coal India. The state-owned miner has been singled out for some harsh treatment, primarily on the charge that the virtually stagnant coal output over the last couple of years has precipitated the impending fuel crisis.

On the whole, a slew of superficial quick-fix measures have been tried out over the last decade. But governments, both at the centre and the states, have been interested in merely kicking the can down the road. There is now serious talk of another bailout for the power sector, including a clean-up of the balance sheets of power utilities by writing off cumulative losses, with an announcement to this effect likely in the budget this week.

Ironically, less than a decade ago, in 2003, two key interventions aimed at stemming the rot in the sector were announced with much fanfare. One, the losses of state electricity boards (SEBs) were taken over through RBI-guaranteed bonds as a “one-time” financial clean-up exercise. Plus, the landmark Electricity Act 2003 simultaneously heralded a booster dose of fresh reforms, including the unbundling of distribution utilities, limited “open access” to consumers, state power regulators and a platform for independent tariff fixation.

“But the sector is back in mess, probably in a much worse position that it was 10 years ago,” a representative of the Association of Power Producers, a lobby group that represents an upcoming project portfolio of around 120,000 MW and has Tata Power, Reliance Power, Essar, Jindal Power, GMR, GVK and Adani among its members, said. A view echoed by Edelweiss, which, in a recent wrap-up on the sector, attributed “serious business risks” for power developers, cascading down to their lenders.

The biggest worry is fuel shortage that’s worsening by the day and threatens to derail the new-found enthusiasm among private developers to set up generation projects. The key reason is that Coal India Ltd (CIL) has simply not been digging fast enough to meet burgeoning demand. Result: over the last three years, an estimated 12,000 MW of coal-fired capacity, most of it in the state and private sectors, has come up without bankable fuel supply assurances. And another 48,000 MW of fresh capacity slated to come up over the next three years (till March 2015) faces an uncertain future in the wake of shaky coal supplies.

Following an intervention by the PMO earlier this year, Coal India was directed to convert all preliminary fuel supply pacts inked with thermal project developers into firm and legally-binding fuel supply agreements (FSAs) and ensure sufficient fuel supplies, even if it is forced to import coal. The move, according to the PMO, would provide fuel supply certainty to projects totalling 50,000 MW in cumulative thermal capacity. But power companies say that they are not getting their quota of supplies and even that which comes is of indifferent quality.

At last count, as of March 5, 10 of the country’s key power stations running on domestic coal were grappling to maintain normal operations with a day’s coal or less, and over a third of the 89 major coal-fired stations were straddled with critical fuel stocks of less than a week. And it’s not even summer yet.

Analysts believe that even if pushed to the limit, CIL will not be able to meet fresh supply commitments. A former Union power secretary, who is now working with the industry, said that to meet future demand, CIL will have to ramp up output by at least 6 per cent annually over the next five to seven years, up from the current 3 per cent growth — which is “next to impossible”.

Says Anish De, CEO-Asia at consulting firm Mercados EMI: “Just from domestic coal, the supply commitments are way too steep. Even if CIL were to pull up its socks, imports would be needed to bridge the gap in the short-term... From a country perspective, we need to look beyond CIL.”

On the ground too, there is cautious optimism on how much difference the PMO’s intervention can make in terms of a fuel boost at the station level. Nothing captures this better than Farakka (West Bengal) or Kahalgaon (Bihar), where two of NTPC Ltd’s super-thermal stations figure prominently in the list of projects with critical coal stocks, despite sitting right in the heart of the coal-mining hub.

Even new projects, like the two mega thermal plants coming up right opposite each other near Jhajjar (Haryana), exemplify the struggles faced by upcoming projects to maintain operations with less than adequate fuel.

While domestic coal production is undoubtedly in a mess, the issue of running power plants on imported coal, the only fallback option, is proving to be an entirely different challenge altogether, as is being experienced by two of the country’s largest projects coming up in the country’s western outpost, Mundra in Gujarat’s Kutch region.

The Indian Express visited some of these project sites to get a sense of the fuel threat on the ground.