DHAKA: A 1,000-megawatt photovoltaic power facility planned in partnership with a Saudi power giant was expected to help Bangladesh resolve its energy crisis, authorities in Dhaka said on Wednesday.
Bangladesh, which is dependent on imported liquefied natural gas, has been struggling with an energy crisis for the past couple of months.
On Monday, the Bangladesh Power Development Board, an agency under the Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources, signed a memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power to set up a 1,000-megawatt solar power facility in the South Asian country.
“It’s a first track initiative to resolve the ongoing energy crisis to some extent,” Mohammad Hossain, director general of the BPDB, told Arab News.
He estimated that the project would comprise up to five power plants, cost around $3 billion, and would not take long to complete.
“It doesn’t take much time to implement solar power plant projects ... If everything goes well, we can expect within the next two years that these solar plants will be able to go for production.”
Authorities are now looking for appropriate land where the solar farm could be established.
“It can be on public land or ACWA Power can also propose some private land,” Hossain said. “Based on that we will conduct a feasibility study of the project.”
The facility would also help Bangladesh achieve its target of generating 40 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2041. With a total installed electricity generation capacity of 25,700 megawatts, the country’s current power generation mix comprises only 3 percent renewables.
“This kind of 1,000-megawatt project will help us to meet the target,” Dr. SM Nasif Shams, director of the Institute of Energy at the University of Dhaka, told Arab News.
“If we can secure this Saudi investment in the renewable energy sector, it will be a very positive thing for Bangladesh.”
The project would not only contribute to Bangladesh’s clean energy goals but also to its energy resilience.
Since mid-July, the government has been resorting to daily power cuts amid high global prices driven up by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Industries have been forced to remain idle for several hours a day as they do not receive sufficient power to run their operations.
In early October, some 80 percent of Bangladesh’s 168 million people were left without electricity after a grid failure, which occurred when more than one-third of the country’s gas-powered units were short of fuel.
“Considering the present situation, it’s difficult to import fossil fuel from foreign countries,” Shams said.
“If we can generate our own energy using renewable sources like sunlight or wind, this is always positive as we don’t have to import fossil fuel. And it’s also environment friendly.”
Saudi solar project to help Bangladesh meet clean energy goals, mitigate power crisis
https://arab.news/w6bkc
Saudi solar project to help Bangladesh meet clean energy goals, mitigate power crisis
- ACWA Power signed power plant agreement with Bangladesh earlier this week
- Bangladesh has for months been struggling with acute energy crisis
Isolated Kremlin critics lament lost future at Nemtsov memorial
- Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death
- Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street
MOSCOW: On a bridge next to the Kremlin on a drizzly Friday morning, a lone Russian police officer stood looking at the half-dozen bunches of flowers laying in memory of slain opposition figure Boris Nemtsov.
The symbolism was almost too much.
Four years into Moscow’s full-scale offensive on Ukraine, which has seen President Vladimir Putin eradicate all forms of dissent and usher in strict military censorship laws that have silenced his critics, few Russians dared, or wanted, to pay tribute.
Nemtsov, a longtime Putin opponent, was shot and killed on February 27 2015, meters from the Kremlin’s red walls. He was 55.
Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death, which came on Friday.
This year, there was barely a trickle. Those who turned up were visibly nervous.
“So few people, they’ve all forgotten,” lamented one elderly man, who refused to give his name.
“Everybody is afraid,” a woman standing nearby added.
Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street.
AFP reporters on Friday morning saw only around a dozen mourners alongside Western ambassadors laying red carnations.
“Keep moving, don’t gather in a crowd, don’t block the way for other citizens,” a police officer said through a megaphone.
Three days after Russia launched its offensive on Ukraine in 2022, protesters had staged an impromptu rally against the war at the memorial on the anniversary of Nemtsov’s death.
Nemtsov’s supporters have always accused Chechen leader and key Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov of ordering his killing.
Kadyrov has rejected the claims.
Five Chechens were convicted of a contract killing but investigators never said who it was ordered by.
- ‘Everything is persecuted’ -
For his followers, Nemtsov is a totemic figure in Russian political life — seen as a once-future leader who might have taken the country on a different path.
“I come here every year,” said 79-year-old scientist Sergei at the bridge on Friday.
“Russia should have had — though unfortunately it didn’t work out — a leader exactly like Nemtsov,” he told AFP, declining to give his surname.
“Right now everything here is suppressed, everything is persecuted, people are sitting in prisons.”
A physicist by education, Nemtsov rose to fame in the 1990s as a young, liberal provincial governor, and was widely tipped to take over from Boris Yeltsin.
He gave his hesitant backing to Putin when the ex-KGB spy was tapped to enter the Kremlin instead, but became an early — and fierce — opponent of what he cast as the Russian leader’s creeping authoritarianism.
He had largely lost popularity and was only a marginal figure in Russian politics when he was killed in 2015. Still, his murder shocked the country and the world.
“The hopes of the whole country were pinned on him — of all the people who wanted it to be free here,” said Olga Vinogradova, a 66-year-old volunteer who tends to the pop-up memorial to Nemtsov on the bridge.
“When this man was killed, naturally, all of us were, we were all just executed at that moment. Because our hopes were destroyed,” she said.
“With this memorial, we remind people that there was a different path for Russia. And that there was a real person who could have led us down this path.”
- ‘Forced out’ -
Nemtsov had strongly opposed Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and Moscow’s military backing for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
He was also a close and early ally of Alexei Navalny, who died in 2024 in an Arctic prison in what his supports say was a poisoning.
Open opposition to the Kremlin is unheard of inside Russia since the first days of the Ukraine offensive — when riot police cracked down hard on the thousands that took to the streets to protest.
All major critics of the Kremlin are in exile, prison or dead.
Those that remain have been silenced.
“Many have been forced out of the country, some have been killed,” said Gleb, a 23-year-old photographer.
A movement or person like Nemtsov was “impossible” to imagine right now, he said.
Still, he held on to a slither of hope.
“But everything can change at any moment.”
