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Fuel shortage may lead to worse city blackouts
Jakarta may face another round of rotating blackouts, worse than those it endured at the end of last year, as one of its main power plants is facing a serious fuel supply deficit
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akarta may face another round of rotating blackouts, worse than those it endured at the end of last year, as one of its main power plants is facing a serious fuel supply deficit.
Murtaqi Syamsuddin, the director of business and risk management at state power company PT PLN,said Wednesday the Muara Tawar plant would have to reduce its capacity by more 1,000 megawatts (MW) if its fuel supply constraints worsened.
Jakarta’s electricity demand during the daytime reaches 5,400 MW, and at night 4,600 MW, PLN said.
The last rotating blackouts in the city were carried out between September and November 2009, following a disruption to a distribution hub in Cawang, East Jakarta, which caused a deficit of 500 MW.
Murtaqi said the Muara Tawar plant was designed to be fully fired by gas, but the supply of the fuel had recently dropped from 250 British thermal units per day (BBTUD) to 60 BBTUD.
“We are currently using oil-based fuels to fire the power plant.
However, as the power plant is designed to be fully fired by gas, the storage capacity of the fuel tanks is very limited or only enough for 10 to 14 days,” Murtaqi said.
Any disruption to the fuel supply would mean the power plant’s capacity could drop by more than 1,000 MW, he said. The full capacity of the plant is 1,264 MW.
If the Muara Tawar plant’s capacity dropped, PLN could provide power from other plants as long as the transmission systems were up and running, he added.
PLN has repeatedly said most of its transmission systems in Jakarta are overburdened.
Upstream oil and gas regulator BPMigas said the deficit in gas supplies to PLN could not be improved until state gas distributor PT Perusahaan Gas Negara and state oil and gas company PT Pertamina finished the construction of LNG receiving terminals that were scheduled to be on stream in
September 2011.
The gas deficit will likely hamper PLN’s plans to switch its oil-based plants to gas, a program which claims to have reduce PLN’s costs significantly.
PLN’s finance director, Setio Anggoro Dewo, said the cost efficiency of switching from oil-based fuel to gas was one of the major contributing factors in PLN’s profits that had reached Rp 10.36 trillion in 2009.
Dewo said switching to oil-based fuels from gas at the Muara Tawar power plant would increase costs by between Rp 2.5 trillion and Rp 3 trillion.
“We hope the government and the House of Representatives will give us additional subsidy,” Dewo said.
This year PLN will receive Rp 37.8 trillion in subsidies and the government plans to proposed to the House to increase this figure by Rp 16.7 trillion in the revised state budget.
