Illogical power tariff hike

While fuel oil prices have declined, power tariff goes up. This illogical and contradictory decision beats all logic. Naturally and logically, it was criticised in almost all daily newspapers of August 29. The government's logic seems to be beyond comprehension and possibly reflects the ignorance of the bureaucrats involved in power policy making and seems to be beyond any normal common sense.
If the government wants to discourage misuse of power, the way to tackle it is by having rules in place to totally reduce power consumption by consumers (including commercial, industrial and domestic) by hunting down all illegal power connections and imposing high levels of penalty. For this, a dedicated special team should be set up region wise and to motivate them. A part of the penalty collected should be given to them as incentive and reward. Conversely, any one helping this illegal activity should be penalised. This will definitely help in rapidly eliminating this criminal malpractice, which is a reality now. This should be a 'TOP PRIORITY' step for all regional electric power offices, the sooner the better, and should be strictly followed up to ensure implementation.
Another way to reduce consumption, particularly for industrial consumers and offices, is to have these units install power factor improvement capacitors. For most industries it is an easy pay off, by improving power factor from 0.8 to 0.9 and above. This writer did it for a private group of industries for all their factories. The pay back period for the installation was less than six months and the monthly power bill came down by around fifteen per cent. To encourage installation of power factor capacitors, these should be allowed to be imported duty free, say by all consumers with average power consumption of say 1000 KWHr per month. That will bring significant national gain by reducing overall national power consumption by around 10 per cent, if not more. The fuel saving for the PDB will be a great public boon. Private sector factories and offices not implementing power factor reducing facilities, say within a year of notification, should be heavily penalised. A possible penalty could be say Tk.2500 per KW of the sanctioned load. For monitoring this, regional PDB offices should have regular follow up of all industrial and commercial consumers, and those ignoring this should be heavily fined on a monthly basis and the PDB official directing this should be rewarded by a percentage of the fine levied. This will be a win-win situation for the electricity consumers and the suppliers, and the nation as a whole.
Engr.S.A.Mansoor
Dhaka.
sam@dhakacom.com