The fourth 3.2 megawatt small-scale power plant was launched by the private sector in Shahid Salimi Industrial Town in Azarshahr – 33 kilometers away from Tabriz, said the managing director of East Azarbaijan Regional Electricity Company.
"The €2.5 million project has been built over 1500 square meters and was linked to the national grid last week," Afshin Roushan Milani was quoted as saying by the Energy Ministry news portal.
Three small-scale power stations with distributed generation systems have become operational in the province since March and agreements to build 26 more plants with a total capacity of 500MW have been signed with private companies.
Distributed generation refers to the electricity produced in small quantities near the point of use, as alternative or supplement to traditional centralized grid-connected power. It reduces the cost and complexity associated with transmission and distribution, while offsetting peak electricity demand and stabilizing the local grid.
Referring to the advantages of DG systems, Milani said there is not much attraction toward building big power plants because of the heavy investments such projects need. “Smaller electricity producing plants have more traction for understandable reasons.”
Milani noted that proximity to end users resulting in potentially less transmission loss and energy waste is a key benefit of smaller units, especially in the remote regions.
"Power wastage in transmission and distribution in the province is close to 2.2% and 9% respectively," he said, expressing hope that the new power stations would do better and operate judiciously.
The new plant's efficiency is 55% or twice that of other plants at 23%.The global power plant average.
Bright Prospects in SE Asia
The installed DG capacity aka distributed power generation (DPG) in Southeast Asia is expected to reach 34,747MW by 2020, up from the 20,450 MW the region had in 2015, according to Frost and Sullivan.
This includes the key types of DPG power plants, namely biomass, waste-to-energy and solar photovoltaic (PV), as well as internal combustion engine-based and temporary rental ones, renewablesnow.com reported earlier.
“Due to the gap in supply, their geography, and weak power sector infrastructure”, some countries across Southeast Asia have been turning their attention towards DPG in order to avoid recurring blackouts. For instance, such systems can be installed despite the inadequacy of the transmission and distribution (T&D) infrastructure and the topographical challenges in isolated islands such as in Indonesia and the Philippines. In turn, they can help in Myanmar where the low electrification rate and transmission line losses stand at 26% and 25%, respectively.
Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar are markets with high potential for the development of such systems. Prolonged delays there in completing base load centralized power generation plants create vast opportunities for diverse DPG solutions that can be quickly deployed to meet soaring electricity demand, energy & environment research analyst, Adwaith Visveswaran, said.
A Frost & Sullivan report -- Trends in the Distributed Power Generation Market in Southeast Asia -- shows that the return on investment (RoI) for DPG developers in Southeast Asia can be hurt by factors such as the cost of batteries for solar systems and the inherent risks in fuel supply contracts.
