This refers to editorial "Nandipur challenge: third-party audits" carried by Business Recorder on October 8. It rightly raises the issue of technical audit of this unfortunate project that has become totally controversial not only because of enormous increase in costs but also due to supposedly revised lower technical specifications. As reported, this power plant was originally specified for satisfactory operation on furnace oil and everyone who knows even a little but about gas turbine-based combined cycle power plant will confirm that such power plants are specially designed for this poor quality fuel and thus are much more expensive than combined cycle power plants designed only for natural gas fuel.
It is also reported that the present power plant was "tried" to be operated on furnace oil, only for a few days and then stopped, apparently not to take risk of damaging the power plant permanently! Instead, new natural gas fuel is being arranged to operate this power plant which confirms the basic fear that power plant was not designed correctly. Technical audit is, therefore, essential to find out if the very expensive power plant is actually designed for continuous operation on furnace oil since that option should be available for immediate operation and whenever natural gas is either not available or too expensive!
If the technical audit confirms that indeed the power plant is not suitable for furnace oil operation, then literally heads should roll since we are accepting a much lower specifications of all main components covering gas turbines, waste heat recovery boilers and flue duct/chimney design and thus allowing suppliers to get away with very large margins! An urgent technical audit by competent and honest engineers is definitely required and choice of Asian Development Bank (ADB) seems to be proper since they have a good past record of honest approach to energy problems.
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