Piston power for Bangladesh

Wärtsilä’s latest order, which was booked in June, is for a 114 MW power plant to be located in Feni, Bangladesh. The customer is Sri Lanka-based Infra & Engineering (pvt) Ltd, a member of the LTL Holdings group.

The new baseload plant will have six Wärtsilä 50 engines and one Wärtsilä 20 machine. The equipment is scheduled for delivery in December of this year, and the facility is expected to become fully operational in autumn 2019, with electricity to be fed to the grid.

During the past 12 months, Wärtsilä had previously booked orders for 11 power plant deliveries to Bangladesh, the company says, and its engines already account for about 25% of Bangladesh’s installed capacity. With this latest order, the Wärtsilä power plant fleet in Bangladesh will exceed 4500 MW.

MAN projects

MAN Energy Solutions has recently announced it is supplying two power plants to Bangladesh, comprising 15 reciprocating engines.

The first plant is currently being erected in Chittagong District on the eastern bank of the Karnaphuli River, with operation scheduled for 2019. Operated by Anlima Energy, it will be powered by six MAN 48/60 engines, each rated at 20.7 MW.

“Increasing energy demand is still the country’s biggest challenge”, says Waldemar Wiesner, MAN’s head of power plant sales for the MENA region. “Despite successful efforts to add new power plants in the past years, the overall generation capacity of 16 GW is still too low, given the country’s 160 million inhabitants and vigorous economic growth. The government continues to address this and is encouraging independent power producers to invest in order to achieve an installed base of 24 GW by 2024. Our new customer Anlima has heeded that call.”

The second plant will have a total capacity of 167 MW and consist of nine MAN 51/60DF (dual fuel) engines. It will be built in Mirsarai, also in Chittagong District, for BPDB-RPCL Powergen Limited. BPDB- RPCL is already operating a 150 MW power plant equipped with MAN 51/60DF reciprocating engines, in Kodda, Gazipur (pictured below).

Responsible for EPC at Mirsarai is the Chinese company Sinohydro, a regular partner for MAN Energy Solutions (with both companies, for example, completing an 80 MW power plant in Niamey, Niger, in 2016).

Mirsarai is MAN’s first joint project in Bangladesh, but in recent years it says it has sold or signed contracts for more than 1.85 GW of capacity in the country.