Government has decided to establish a brand new electricity power plant at Barataria. This plant would take over the work of the Wrightson Road Power Station, which is no longer as efficient and reliable as it needs to be to properly service communities, Public Utilities Minister Mustapha Abdul Hamid said at yesterday’s post-Cabinet news conference at the Diplomatic Centre in St Ann’s.
The Minister had no figures of the cost of the plant, but said construction will begin in the second half of 2011. He said the Wrightson Road Power Plant, which was built in 1963, had an installed capacity of 300 megawatts. But, he noted, only 120 to 150 megawatts were available to T&TEC and the capacity of the plant had been known to drop below 100 megawatts.
He said there was a definite need for a new plant to satisfy the current and future needs of the city of Port of Spain and north-west Trinidad. He said Cabinet had agreed to the construction of a 720 megawatt power plant, which would be done in two phases. The first phase will see the installation of a plant which could generate 360 megawatts of power, while in the second phase the plant will be ramped up to 750 megawatts. The plant would be located on 15 hectares in Barataria, south of the Beetham Highway and south-west of the Barataria Flyover. He said the plant would use treated effluent from the Beetham Waste Water Treatment plant for the purpose of cooling. The plant would be a combined cycle plant-that is it would use both natural gas and steel turbines, he said.
Abdul-Hamid stressed that there is no automatic arrangement with Powergen (which is 51 per cent state-owned) to operate the plant.
’We will go out for tender. We are contemplating a power purchase agreement. To the extent that the Government wishes to be involved in the operation, the Government can and may choose to do so, meaning that the plant can be owned entirely by the private sector and the Government simply purchases power from that plant on a commercial basis. Or the Government may choose to have a certain percentage of participation,’ he said.
He said all this is still to be determined by the sub-committee responsible for electricity infrastructure.
By: Ria Taitt
Via: Trinidad Express