Agencies work to streamline power-plant licensing

The two agencies have agreed on two courses of action, the department’s director-general Nattapon Nattasomboon said after a recent discussion with Kawin Thangsupanich, secretary-general of the commission.

First, they will eliminate unnecessary or redundant steps. Currently, after the department forwards applications to establish a plant to the commission for consideration, the commission sends the applications back to the department for re-examination.

Second, the agencies will conduct joint safety inspections of power plants. The department up to now focused only on inspecting the plants’ transmission of power to the grid and not on checking the plants’ safety practices.

Currently 41 applications for power-plant licences with total capacity of 2.77 gigawatts are awaiting the consideration of the Industry Ministry’s screening committee, chaired by permanent secretary Witoon Simachokedee.

Three of them are natural-gas-fuelled plants with the capacity of 1.95GW, nine biomass plants with 308.3 megawatts, four biogas plants with 149MW, 19 solar-energy plants with 138.5MW, four hydropower plants with 132.8MW, one bio-waste plant with 60MW and one hot-wind-power plant with 30MW.

Among 19 applications for small power plants under consideration with the capacity 

of 16.5MW are seven biomass plants with 7MW, eight solar-power plants with 4.2MW, one biogas plant with 1MW and two hydropower plants with 0.4MW. The total number of applications is 60 with the capacity of 2.79GW.

From January 2012 to last Wednesday, the Industry Ministry issued 141 licences for power plants with total capacity of 4.73GW, eight of which are natural-gas plants with 3.81GW, 85 solar plants with 454MW, 22 biomass plants with 276.6MW, six wind plants with 81.1MW, 13 biogas plants with 59.2MW, two hot-wind plants with 26MW, three bio-waste plants with 16.7MW, one hydropower plant with 10MW and one thermal-energy plant with 2.4MW, Nattapon said.