By KYAW YE LYNN | FRONTIER
YANGON – The Ministry of Electricity and Energy has selected the winners of a tender for rental power projects in Mandalay Region, an official says.
Although the winners have not been formally announced, U Han Zaw, chief engineer at the Electric Power Generation Enterprise, told Frontier that the tender evaluation committee had already made a decision.
He confirmed that VPower of Hong Kong has been selected to operate a plant at Myingyan, while National Infrastructure Holding Company will run a plant at nearby Kyaukse. Both will be fuelled by natural gas from the Shwe field.
“We are in process of issuing the letters of award and signing the [power purchasing agreements],” Han Zaw said today.
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He added the plants should be ready by next summer. “We don’t have any power plant projects [coming online] in 2019 and 2020. So these projects must be in operation when next summer comes,” he said.
The tender was announced on January 5, with an initial February 19 deadline that was pushed back to March 6.
The plants will replace rental power projects operated by British firm Aggreko (95 megawatts) and APR Energy (102MW) from the United States. In place since 2014, these contracts were shorter – from 12 to 18 months – and have already been extended several times.
A senior official at the NIHC office in Yangon declined to comment.
However, VPower announced on May 7 that it had received a letter of acceptance from EPGE “which sets out the mutual understandings on key terms for the definitive agreement in respect of the purchase of electricity”.
The company said it expects its 90MW plant to come online in February 2019. VPower already holds three power rental contracts in Myanmar, totalling more than 220MW.
U Htu Htu Aung, the executive director of Supreme Group, which partnered with APR on the Kyaukse rental project, said his company had not submitted a bid.
He added that the previous contract ended on April 22, but declined to comment further.
