Panama flag ship “MV S Pinel” arrived at Mongla port with 33,000 tons coal for Rampal thermal power plant Wednesday evening.
Manager Riazul Haque of shipping agent M/S Togi Shipping confirmed the information, adding that the ship left Indonesia on January 27 with the coal.
He said the ship will unload coal from 10pm and then the coal would be delivered to Rampal power plant.
Another foreign ship will bring 55,000 metric tons of coal on February 16 for the power plant, he added.
Syed Ekram Ullah, managing director of Bangladesh-India Friendship Power Company (Pvt) Limited, said: “Due to disruption of coal supply from Indonesia, power generation at Rampal was suddenly stopped. This problem occurred as it took some time to release the dollars. However, the problem is over now.”
He added: “Coal will come regularly from now on. As a result, Rampal will once again generate electricity with coal from June. Besides, work is going on vigorously to generate electricity from the second unit. There will be no problem to generate 1,320 megawatts of electricity.”
On January 14, the authorities suspended production at the Rampal power station because of a shortage of coal – only 29 days after the first unit of the plant went into commercial electricity generation.
According to sources at Rampal power plant, Bangladesh Bank was delaying the approval of opening the Letter of Credit (LC) for coal import due to the dollar shortage.
BIFPCL had written to the Power Department and Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB) in this regard.
On January 10 and 11, the senior officials of the power plant held several rounds of meetings with various levels of officials of Bangladesh Bank.
