Iran’s first and largest mobile power plant, which can supply electricity to up to 5,000 people, has been tested and launched in the capital Tehran, head of the board of directors at Nama Mad Parsargad Industrial Group announced on Saturday.
In a ceremony for launching the power plant in Shamsabad Industrial City, Seyyed Ali Sarbaz-Hosseini also told Mehr News Agency that the mobile power plant, with an output of three megavolts, can be employed in emergency conditions, such as natural disasters, as well as for generating power in faraway electricity-deprived areas. Some builds of mobile power plants are usually mounted on trailers or other carriers with an output varying from days to months and burning gas as feedstock.
Sarbaz-Hosseini added that the small-scale power plant is capable of operating even when an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.5 Richter occurs.
Houshang Falahatian, deputy energy minister, told IRNA earlier that the power production capacity of small-scale power plants with a distributed generation system is expected to rise by 3,000 megawatts over the next few years.
“Distributed generation of electricity, downsizing power plants and exploiting small-scale power plants are some of the Energy Ministry’s strategies,” he said.
Sarbaz-Hosseini stressed that after the power plant went on stream, the Persian Gulf country joined the US, Germany and Russia, which had already obtained the knowhow of manufacturing mobile power plants. According to the official, the mobile power plant has been constructed based on international standards of the power industry and its quality is on a par with those of American and European companies.
"All stages of designing and constructing the power plant have been implemented by Iranian engineers in a six-month period, which reduced the overall costs to one-fifth of the foreign plants," he said. To attract investment in the sector, the Energy Ministry is granting facilities to investors in small-scale power plants that operate at less than 25 megawatts.
Indigenization of the knowhow is in line with the policies of Resistance Economy, which is a set of guidelines proposed by the Leader of Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei on empowering domestic production and weaning the economy off oil revenues. Sarbaz-Hosseini also said plans have been made to mass produce the power plant with an export-oriented approach.
Nominal power generation capacity stands at around 74,000 MW nationwide, with 61,000 MW coming from thermal power plants, 12,000 MW from hydroelectric plants and only 1,000 MW from nuclear power.
