The Power Division, Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources, in a rejoinder issued on March 23 over The Independent news report titled “Costly Electricity from Jharkhand: Bangladesh to buy power from Adani Group” published on 21 March 2017, said, “We strongly protest the report as this was not based on facts and figure. The title of the report claims that the Government of Bangladesh is going to buy electricity from an Indian company at a higher rate, whereas the levelized tariff that has been reported was the lowest among the quoted tariffs.”
The statement said, in the seventh paragraph of the report it was stated, “A difference of 10 to 20 US cents per unit makes a huge difference over the period of the contract” whereas the report itself mentioned the total levelized tariff is 8.7 cents. So, the difference of 10 to 20 cents doesn’t at all arise. Moreover, the amount of extra payments that has been mentioned in the report seems to have been done arbitrarily, not on actual figures.
The Power Division said, the negotiated tariff with Adani Power Limited is the lowest if all other factors are considered. There are additional factors in buying the electricity from Adani, which do not exist in other 2 instances that were given in the report. These factors are: a) transmission cost as the power plant is located in India, b) taxes and duties that an Indian company usually pays to Government of India, c) increase of Capex and auxiliary consumption due to stringent environmental norms. After deducting the values of all those factors, the tariff of Adani Power Limited is the lowest among all the coal based power plants so far licensed for implementation.   If the additional components of Adani are deducted from its levelized capacity price, it would reach to 2.96 as opposed to S Alam’s contracted price of 3.504. It may be mentioned here that the energy price component from the levelized price has been excluded as this is a pass through item.  It should also be mentioned here that the Power Division has already requested the Government of India to exempt the project of Adani Power Limited from all taxes and duties applicable for Indian companies based on the ground that this power plant will be built to produce power for Bangladesh only, the Power Division statement said.