Adani halves power supply to Bangladesh over £653m unpaid bills

INDIAN conglomerate Adani has slashed crossborder electricity supply to Bangladesh by half due to some $850 million (£653m) in unpaid bills, power officials said last Sunday (3), with Dhaka scrambling to boost production to stem blackouts.

“We are trying to meet the gap by running other plants,” Rezaul Karim, chairman of the state-run Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB), said last Sunday.

Adani’s coalfired Godda plant in India’s Jharkhand state – a $2 billion (£1.54bn) project including transmission lines that opened last year – usually supplies between seven per cent to 10 per cent of Bangladesh’s baseload power demand of 13 GW.

But Adani had warned Dhaka in September to settle its bills, which had surged to around $850m.

At the time, Adani called it an “unsustainable situation, where we are meeting not only our supply commitments but also those to our lenders and suppliers, despite rising receivables”.

There was no immediate comment from Adani last Sunday.

“We are discussing the issue with them (Adani), and informed them that it is not possible to make the total payment in a single month,” Karim added.

He said Bangladesh paid $97m (£74.54m) to Adani in October, which was “higher than the previous three months’s payment”.

Demand is usually lower in November, when Bangladesh enters a relatively cooler period. It comes after months of blistering heat when people rely on energy-hungry air conditioners to keep cool.

Last Friday (1), Adani’s Godda plant supplied 724 megawatts, against the installed capacity of 1,496 MW, with Bangladesh facing around 1,680 MW of load shedding.

The country also imports 1,160 MW from the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura.