Demand soars amid power outages

With the power-supply situation getting worse in the countryside, people are increasingly buying solar home systems (SHSs) to illuminate both their homes and business points.
The countrywide expansion of the national grid, according to stakeholders, to bring 100-percent people under grid-power coverage last year led to a fall in the number of SHS clients.
Moreover, the absence of instant after-sales service and maintenance costs a few years after installation also caused many to abandon solar-home systems.

As people in the countryside have been availing grid-power supply adequately for the last couple of years, many opted to keep their SHSs in storerooms, they said.
However, a drastic fall in power generation and supply with a dearth of coal, gas and fuel oils due to dollar crisis in the last one year or so, people have started to reuse their SHSs.
SHS sellers are also mostly busy dealing with new customers in this changed situation.
Nannu Miazi, a Nischintapur villager under Matlab North sub-district in Chandpur, recently bought an SHS at a cost of Tk 30,000 that can power two fans and two lights round the clock.
“The SHS has given my family members some relief from frequent power cuts in this scorching summer,” he told the FE this week.
Shah Jalal, a businessman in Nischintapur bazaar said, his locality saw severe load-shedding at most hours of the day and night during Eid-ul-Azha days.
Such power outages were not expected during the festival-linked holidays, he added.
“We suffered a lot,” he said, as he spoke to a solar home system supplier to buy one to get relief from unbearable temperatures this summer.
According to Marzia Akter, an inhabitant of Sujatpur village, as demand has increased, so has the price of solar home systems significantly.
She said her family bought an SHS at Tk 20,000 last year, but vendors were presently charging Tk 30,000 for a system with a similar specification.
According to the government’s renewable energy database, more than 6.0 million solar home systems have been installed across the country until now.
The panels have the capacity to generate 263.793 megawatt of electricity.
Dipal C Barua, a pioneer in the field of renewable energy, acknowledged an increase in demand for SHSs by around 20 per cent following a rise in load-shedding.
At the same time, he said, solar panels were unavailable in the market as importers faced setbacks in opening letters of credit (LCs) for dollar crisis.
Banks are charging a 110-per cent margin to open LCs for renewable energy equipment, he said, adding that dollar crisis has contributed to a hike in SHS prices by around 40 per cent.
“Renewable energy can be a feasible alternative solution to the current power crisis,” said Mr Barua, also chairman of Bright Green Energy Foundation.
He said tax incidences on renewable energy equipment were too high which are a stumbling block to the expansion of the cheap energy source.
“We expected cuts in the rates of tax and duty on renewable equipment in this budget…,” said Mr Barua.
Had the sector got a tax waiver this time, he said, the country might have averted power crisis next summer.
At present, the country’s installed capacity of renewable energy is 1192.373 megawatt. A majority of them comes from solar power.
[email protected]