Barapukuria Goes Aark as Its Last Working Units Fail

Dinajpur — The coal plant at Barapukuria is sending nothing to the grid. Both units that were still running have tripped, one on Monday and one early Tuesday, and the third has been idle for years. For the north-west, that means a familiar outage with a sharper edge: this time there is no partial fallback inside the station.

The site at Parbatipur, Dinajpur, is rated at 525 megawatts. Two 125MW units date from 2006. A 275MW third unit was added later, around 2018. On paper it is the country's mine-mouth coal station, fed by the Barapukuria pit next door, and it was built as a domestic answer to imported fuel. In practice it has rarely looked like that rating. Unit 2 has been out since November 2020 after a breakdown that was never fully repaired. Older records say the three units have not run together. Through 2023 the station was often at about half capacity, and coal shortages, boiler damage and pump failures have taken units offline for days or months at a time.

What failed this week was the remainder. Chief Engineer Md Abu Bakkar Siddik says the 125MW Unit 1 stopped early Monday with a mechanical fault. Even before that stop it was a shadow of its plate capacity, feeding about 55MW to 65MW. Unit 3, the larger set, stopped at about 5:05 a.m. Tuesday. While it was up it had been putting roughly 160MW to 170MW on the national grid, not the 275MW on the nameplate. Add those two contributions and the station was delivering something near 220MW to 235MW before the last trip — under half its installed capacity, and now zero.

The cause of the final trip is not settled in the reporting. One account, carried by UNB, says a grid failure set off a mechanical fault in Unit 3. Daily Sun, also quoting Siddik, says a short circuit and a fire in the instrumentation and control section of Unit 1 at about 5:10 a.m. Tuesday tripped Unit 3 and took the whole plant down. Those are different sequences. Until the plant publishes a fault report, the safe statement is that a fault on the smaller unit and a trip on the larger one have overlapped, and generation has stopped.

Repair work is under way, without a date. Bangladeshi engineers are on Unit 1. Chinese engineers, including staff from contractor Harbin International, are on Unit 3. Siddik has said crews want generation back quickly. He has not said when. That gap matters more than the wording. A plant with this history does not restart on a press quote. Unit 1 itself was forced off as recently as late April, when stones mixed with coal ruptured a boiler pipe, and was back only in early May at about 55MW. Unit 3 has spent long stretches in overhaul. A restart that returns both sets to their recent output, rather than their rated output, would still leave the station well short of 525MW.

Locally, the loss is already being felt as worse load-shedding in Dinajpur and other parts of the Rangpur division. Northern districts have been through this before. When Barapukuria has gone fully dark in past years, eight districts in the region have taken the cut, because the station is a large share of nearby supply even when it is running badly. Nationally the missing megawatts are smaller than the headline. A few hundred megawatts will not decide the country's power balance on their own. They do add to a shortage the World Bank, in Tuesday's Bangladesh Development Update, treats as one reason growth may sit at 3.4% in both FY26 and FY27. The Bank's list is gas, electricity, weak banks and thin tax revenue. A mine-mouth coal plant that cannot run is a concrete case of the electricity line in that list.

The deeper problem is not a single Tuesday morning. Barapukuria's installed capacity has been a poor guide to what it delivers. Unit 2 has been a write-off for almost six years. The other two spend much of their time derated, and the coal mine next door has had its own stoppages. Full output would need on the order of 5,500 tonnes of coal a day, a figure from earlier plant reporting, and the station has seldom been in a state to burn that. Each new trip then lands on a system already short of reliable power, which is why a mechanical fault in Dinajpur shows up in a growth forecast written in Dhaka.

What is still missing is a restart schedule, a clear account of whether the trigger was a grid fault or a fire in the control section, and a statement of how many megawatts will actually return rather than how many the units are rated for. Until those are published, the north-west is short of power, and the energy warning in this week's growth report has a plant with the lights out.