Cabinet Approves 8 Rental Power Projects
The minister for water and power Pakistan said the cabinet decided to adopt all the 11 recommendations of the ADB that took about five months to complete its third part audit of the rental power projects. He said the electricity rates would go up by 6.1 per cent if eight RPPs of 1,156MW were implemented as advised by the ADB, but the increase could go up to 9.9 per cent if 14 RPPs of 1,994MW were realised. He, however, agreed that the increase did not take into account the impact of oil that was a pass-through item and its prices could not be estimated.
He said the ADB had also asked the government to remove inconsistencies in RPP contracts if legally possible, to strictly enforce contract timelines and to get their commercial operations certified by internationally acceptable independent engineers.
The ADB had said that the elimination of 100 per cent loadshedding during peak hours was not a viable option from the affordability perspective, he said. The bank had also called for quality controls of old and used RPPs strictly under the trade policy, optimum utilisation of available gas and find new resources aggressively and must continuously run RPPs till 2012 to provide room for improvement in Wapda’s generation plants, he added.
