WORLD NEWS | Adani pledges to supply electricity at low prices: Report

DHAKA, Feb. 23 (PTI) India’s Adani Power on Thursday pledged to supply electricity to Bangladesh at reduced prices in line with the generation costs of the country’s existing coal-fired power plants.

“Adani will import coal for its factories at the same price that Bangladeshi coal-fired power plants import for themselves,” an Adani official was quoted by the mass-run Prothom Alo newspaper as saying.

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The Indian company agreed to revise its coal purchase price to keep the unit price of electricity almost on par with Bangladesh’s coal-fired power plants such as Rampal and Payra, which are joint ventures with India and China, the company said.

“A responsible official of the Adani Group in Bangladesh has confirmed the development to Prothom Alo,” the newspaper reported, while Bangladeshi officials declined immediate comment.

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Bangladesh’s state-run Power Development Board (PDB) earlier this month sought to amend a 2017 power purchase agreement with Adani Power Ltd as coal-fired power appeared too expensive.

However, a senior PDB official said briefly on Thursday that Adani Power had sent a five-member delegation to negotiate with Bangladeshi officials as “high coal prices” for the Adani power plant purchase in India’s Jharkhand state had become a dispute. key factor.

Earlier media reports said Bangladesh had asked for a price revision after it received a request from Adani Power to open a letter of credit in India to import coal from a 1,600 MW power plant in Jharkhand’s Gorda district.

“In our opinion, the coal price they quoted ($400/ton) is too high — it should be lower than $250/ton, which is what we pay for imported coal from other thermal power plants,” an official said I said I would rather remain anonymous.

Adani Power has asked Bangladesh for a bill of demand, which will be submitted to Indian authorities before a letter of credit can be opened for coal imports, as their plants are designed to export electricity to neighboring countries.

The US-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) had earlier called the Adani project “too expensive and risky for Bangladesh” in a 2018 report.

Bangladesh currently imports 1,160 megawatts of electricity from India, while the 2017 deal was supposed to buy power from Adani Power Ltd for 25 years, starting in March this year.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)