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Italian Firm to Build 910MW Power Station in Iran

Italian Firm to Build 910MW Power Station in Iran
Italian Firm to Build 910MW Power Station in Iran

Italian groups will help build a major thermal power station south of Iran that roughly matches the output capacity of the country's only nuclear power plant.

Operations to build Dezful Combined Cycle Power Plant went underway on Thursday in a ceremony attended by Sattar Mahmoudi, Iran's caretaker energy minister, and provincial officials in the city of Dezful north of Khuzestan Province, IRNA reported.

The 910-megawatt plant will consist of two 305-MW gas units that will run on highly-efficient F-class turbines and a steam unit with 300-MW output capacity. With an efficiency of 58%, the Dezful plant will be a major step from most Iranian thermal plants with an average efficiency of around 37%.

The plant is slated to be built in three years at an estimated cost of 26 trillion rials (about $650 million). Italian power engineering firm Ansaldo Energia will build the plant which will be financed by a pool of foreign and domestic investors with SACE, the Italian Export Credit Agency, to provide cover for part of the funding.

The state-owned Thermal Power Plants Holding Co. is the general contractor and Iran's Ghadir Investment Co. is tasked with raising funds for the project.

Ansaldo is rapidly expanding its venture in Iran's energy market. Earlier this week, the company signed a preliminary deal to collect and use associated petroleum gas that is flared at Phase 12 of South Pars Gas Field to produce electrical power. The company operates as a full-service provider with a broad portfolio on heavy duty gas turbines offering complete maintenance solutions on power generation rotating equipment and plants.

The Dezful combined-cycle unit almost measures up to the 1,000-MW Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant that reportedly took a decade and $8 billion-$10 billion to be built by Russia's assistance in Bushehr Province by the Persian Gulf coast.

Iran is making efforts to upgrade its mostly aging thermal plants – the backbone of its power infrastructure – into combined cycle units and build new power stations to meet the growing domestic demand.

A combined-cycle power plant uses both gas and steam turbines to produce up to 50% more electricity from the same fuel than a traditional simple-cycle plant. The waste heat from the gas turbine is routed to the nearby steam turbine, which generates extra power.

Iran's Total electricity production capacity stands at 77,000 MW, over 62,000 MW of which are generated by thermal power plants operated by TPPHC. Government data showed that combined-cycle power plants accounted for 35.9% of total production in the fiscal year 2016-17, generating 103.9 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity.

Plans are in place to launch 5,000 MW of new power capacity each year through 2022, the end of Iran's Sixth Five-Year Economic Development Plan.

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