Kuwait hopes to end its electricity crisis with new generating plant

Kuwait is pinning its hopes of ending an electricity crisis on plans to bring its first new power plant in more than two decades into service next summer. The Subiya power plant will be ready to generate power at a capacity of 1,320 megawatts next summer, the Kuwaiti minister of electricity and water, Badr al Shuraian, told parliament. Kuwait awarded a US$2.65 billion (Dh9.73bn) construction contract for the plant to the US company General Electric and South Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries only last September.

Mr al Shuraian's announcement came a week after power consumption in Kuwait reached a record 99 per cent of the country's 11,000mw of maximum output capacity amid soaring temperatures. "The Subiya power plant will relieve Kuwait from the ghost of 99 per cent and next year we'll get over the problem," he said during a special parliamentary meeting to discuss the crisis, which has caused repeated power cuts because of overloaded transformers.

Development of the power plant, which will be the first built in Kuwait since 1988, has been fast-tracked. It is scheduled to come on stream in two stages, reaching its full capacity of 2,000mw in 2012. Power demand in the emirate was increasing at 8 per cent annually, Mr al Shuraian said. The Kuwaiti government has a monopoly on all of its utilities but is introducing reforms aimed at opening the power and water sector to private developers.

On Sunday, the state news agency KUNA reported the government had approved a second, 1,500mw power project at al Zour that would be the first in Kuwait to involve private-sector investment. The proposed $2.6bn plant would start operations in June 2012, said Adel al Roumi, the president of Kuwait's partnerships technical bureau. "We are pre-qualifying a strategic shareholder now and a tender document for a strategic shareholder will be issued in October this year," Mr al Roumi said.

A combined gas and solar plant with a generating capacity of 250mw is also planned. Local and international companies would be invited to bid on the project by the end of this year, Mr al Roumi said. He put the cost of the development at $300 million but other industry officials have suggested $650m. Like other Gulf states, Kuwait is seeking to boost its power generation capacity to meet rising electricity demand from industrial and residential development.

It hopes to develop new gasfields to fuel its power stations and has also signed a four-year contract with Shell and Vitol for liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies. The LNG imports began last summer. At the same time, the electricity ministry has embarked on a programme to upgrade Kuwait's ageing electricity grid. About 5,000 of the country's 28,000 transformers did not meet the required standards and would be replaced, Mr al Shuraian said. The ministry would hire international power companies as advisers, he added. Another official blamed underground cables that are 30 to 40-years-old for causing power cuts and said the ministry had signed contracts to have them replaced.

tcarlisle@thenational.ae