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Yearly review of Iran's power sector

Business Materials 15 March 2016 18:56 (UTC +04:00)

Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Dalga Khatinoglu - Trend:

Iran's power sector passed a milestone year in terms of replacing liquid fuels by natural gas as fuel.

The latest weekly report of Iran's Energy Ministry, published on its official website on March 15 says the country's power plants were supplied with 53.5 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas during 350 days of the current fiscal year, or 16.4 percent more than in the same period last year (Iran's fiscal year will end on March 20).

On the other hand, diesel and mazut consumption in electricity sector has decreased by more than 31 .3 percent and 31.6 percent respectively to around 5.7 billion liters and 6.7 billion liters in the mentioned period.

The country's total power production capacity also stood at 73,933 megawatts (MW), about 781 MW more than the previous year. The growth is far less that the targeted plan, which predicted at the beginning of the current fiscal year that the country's power growth would experience a 5-percent growth.

Iran has generated 270.5 billion kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity energy and the net exports reached 5.58 billion kWh.

Power plants

Generation capacity (MW)

Share in total generation

Steam power plants

15,829

21.5%

Gas power plants

25,934

35%

combined-cycle power plant

18,494

25%

Hydro-electric power plants

11,216

15%

Nuclear power plant

1020

1.4%

Renewables

1020

0.3%

The share of each type of power plants in the total generation capacity almost remained the same year-to-year. It shows that the country has failed to realize the plan of converting steam and gas power plants (with around 30 percent efficiency) to the combined-cycle ones (with 40-45 percent efficiency) during the current year.

None of the power plants which inaugurated during current year, is a combined-cycle.

The electricity consumption increased in all spheres in Iran, excepting industry sector during current year.

Sectors

Consumption in 10 months of current year (Billion kWh)

Share in total consumption in current year

Consumption in last year (Billion kWh)

Share in total consumption in last year

Housing

67.478

34.3%

71.163

32.4%

Public

18.316

9.3%

19.767

9%

Agriculture

31.859

16.2%

35.188

16%

Industrial

60.896

31%

74.294

33.8%

Others

18.121

9.2%

19.241

8.8%

Toral

196.67

100%

219.653

100%

The growth in housing power consumption seems to have occurred due to increasing number of households connected to power grid in this year. The number increased by 712,000 to 26.451 million households.

Dalga Khatinoglu is head of Trend Agency's Iran news service, follow him on Twitter: @dalgakhatinoglu

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