State-owned Power Grid Company of Bangladesh (PGCB) is going to build the country’s maiden 400KV GIS grid sub-station at Madhunaghat in Chattogram.
The sub-station will be built for the transmission of electricity from 1200MW coal-fired power plant at Matarbari in Cox’s Bazar, the construction of which is undergoing, to Dhaka via Madhunaghat, a PGCB official said.
PGCB spokesperson A B M Badruddozza Khan said the sub-station will be built with Japanese technology. To this end, a bilateral contract was signed with a joint venture formed by Hitachi Corporation of Japan and Etern of China on Sunday at PGCB’s headquarters in the capital. As per the contract, the joint venture company will construct the 400/230KV grid substation in Madhunaghat on a turnkey basis within 34 months and will hand it over to PGCB.
The project cost is estimated at around Tk 531 crore. Japan International Co-operation Agency (JICA) and PGCB will fund the project. Three transformers, each having a capacity of 500/750MVA, made by Hitachi of Japan will be installed in the sub-station. PGCB Company Secretary Md Ashraf Hossain and Etern-Hitachi joint venture company Country Director D K M Fazlul Haque signed a deal in this regard on behalf of their respective organizations.
The signing programme was attended, among others, by PGCB Managing Director Masum Al Beruni, Executive Director Mohammad Yakub Ali Chowdhury, Mohammad Safaet Hossain and Khandokar Mohammad Abdul Hai, Project Director Bazlul Munir and the joint-venture company project manager Imteaz Ahmed.
PGCB official said currently there are 4 grid sub-stations with capacity of 400KV in the country. All sub-stations are air insulated switch gear (AIS) based technology. It needs huge land to build and maintenance of these types of sub-stations. On the other hand latest GIS technology-based sub-station takes less land and its efficiency is also high. GIS sub-station is not new in the country but the existing ones are of 230KV or 132KV capacity.