Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 28
By Farhad Daneshvar – Trend:
Private sector is apparently gearing up to grab a larger share form Iran’s power market in the coming years.
Given the latest official figures, it seems that private sector will have a 70-percent share in increasing Iran’s capacity for producing power over the coming three years.
Over the past four years, the Iranian government has concluded $12.3 billion worth of investment contracts with private sector to develop the country’s power sector.
About $8.4 billion out of the total figure has envisaged developing the thermal power plants and $2.6 billion have gone to the renewable energy sector. In the meantime, contracts worth $1.258 billion have been concluded to develop the distributed power generation (DG).
Under the existing contracts, the private sector is expected to contribute 15,444 megawatt (MW) to the country’s total capacity for generating power by 2021.
This is while, according to the sixth development plan, the country plans to increase its nominal electric generation capacity to 100,000 MW by 2021.
The nominal electric generation capacity has already increased by 1,904 MW to 78,332 MW in Iran since the beginning of the current fiscal year (starting March 20).
In other word, the country needs to add 21,668 MW to its capacity over the next three years out of which 15,444 MW is expected to be carried out by the private sector.
The figures suggest that the private sector will have a share of about 71 percent in increasing the nominal power capacity of the country over the coming years.
Iran's power plants generated over 261.91 TWh (terawatt hours) of electricity since the beginning of the current Iranian fiscal year (March 21, 2017) until Jan.12, according to the latest statistics published by Iran's Energy Ministry.
The output was almost seven percent more compared to the same period of the preceding year.
Between March 20 and Jan.12, Iran’s electricity exports increased by 10 percent to reach 6.805 TWh.
The country is expected to add 1,260 MW to its electric generation capacity by March 2018 - of that 632 MW will be renewables’ share.