GM of the Company confirmed that the Afsin-Elbistan power plant tender was cancelled because none of the bids were satisfactory for themselves. 

GM said Company was not satisfied with the offers which they received and will hold another tender as soon as possible. Their administrative board had agreed to re-evaluate the tender specifications and will possibly make alterations. GM noted that “There are some technical and administrative problems in the bid specifications. We are trying to make improvements to the specifications and then we will reopen the bid within a month,”

The new tender is expected to be released by February 2009 at the latest. GM said the Company would undertake the establishment of the power plants itself if the second tender does not produce a satisfactory bid. 

Recently investors from Japan, India, England, Russia, the US, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium, along with local private enterprises Sabancı, Çalık, Ciner and Limak, obtained the bid specifications for the project which includes construction of the thermal power plants, selling the electricity from these thermal power plants and mine mouth coal in the Afsin-Elbistan region. 

After failing to attract the funds necessary to finance the Afşin-Elbistan project, in June 2008, six of the interested companies that had planned to bid requested a four-month postponement in the tender; however, the Ministry refused to postpone the tender, noting that the request was received too late and that the tender needed to go forward as scheduled on June 26,2008. Thus, Park Teknik of Ciner Holding and Akfen Energy were the only companies that ended up participating in the tender. 

The Local Electricity Trading and Contracting Company will be providing guarantee to purchase electricity from the company that wins the bid for a period of 15 years. However, the companies’ offers on price per kWh were found higher than expected. As a result neither of the bids was accepted and the initial tender was canceled. 

Building the Afsin Elbistan C and D units estimated to require almost US $5 billion of investment budget.

The Company decided to cancel the tender after it considered the price the bidders wanted for electricity produced from the plant was too high. Park Teknik and Akfen Insaat-Akfen Enerji said they would sell power from the plant at between US$0.15 and US$0.18 per kilowatt hour for a period of 15 years, 

No foreign investors bid in the tender, held during increasingly turbulent global conditions.

Each of the new units will have capacity of 1,200 megawatts (MW), ramping up production capability at the power station in central Turkey, which currently has a total capacity of 2,800 MW

It would be unfair to tell but unfortunately it reminds all minds to presume that the bidder companies were not in list the most favored companies.

The prices declared in the proposal documents are the prices effective only after the plants were constructed and started to generate electricity and feed to the national grid. That is 4 years ahead of present time.

It is for sure that energy prices will get higher and higher in 4 years time, unless you turn more to your local indigenous energy resources, lignite, wind and hydro.

The simple calculations as made by inexperienced / unqualified journalists in the daily newspapers are incorrect, also misleading,

More important than that the existing inexperienced public employees believe in those incorrect calculations, instead of making the calculations by themselves,

One should know that the prevailing proposal prices are the market prices. They are saturated/ calculated and finalized with careful risk analysis in fierce, open and fair competition between 30+ participants

There will be no better / no cheaper prices than the prices received at this last round,

It is our sincere feeling that the bidders were also quite reluctant to carry out the contract since the prices were too low, not to high, and again our sincere feeling that they maight ask the administration to cancel the tender

There is no more interested party to participate to the new third tender unless commercial conditions are changed/ updated, scopes reduced

This is wasted time and money of the public resources. There is no easy solution, inexperienced public employees will get training but their training cost is too high and we all pay them to get that training

Your comments are always welcome.

Haluk Direskeneli
ODTU ME’1973 - Ankara MMO 6606
0533 353 1530-  0312 287 4914
URL: http://energynewsletterturkey.blogspot.com/