2024-08-23 07:16:49
Ecuador will pay USD 0.14 per kilowatt hour of electric energy with the barge that it will rent from the Turkish company Karpowership, confirmed the Minister of Energy.
In an interview with Teleamazonas on the morning of July 19, 2024, Energy Minister Antonio Gonçalves explained the process of acquiring the energy-generating barge, which will ultimately be rented to the Turkish company Karpowership.
According to Goncalves, the process was carried out in three stages:
A first market study, between January and April 2024, in which nine companies participated
A second, more “refined” market study, involving 14 companies, was conducted between late May and early June.
The pre-contractual stage, where the terms of reference for the energy required by the country, “based on time and availability”, were uploaded to the National Public Procurement Service (Sercop) portal. In addition, the barge was required to have an anchoring system, because it was not possible to build a port in a short time.
“Once those terms of reference were removed, only two companies remained, one that was offering for sale a barge from 1961, which did not have an anchoring system, and Karpowership, which did have the anchoring system because it is the expertise (sic) of that company,” said Goncalves.
According to the Minister, the contract will be signed next week, “if everything goes well.” At the moment, the Government is reviewing and validating all the documentation and the issue of guarantees.
PRIMICIAS reported on July 17 that the KPS EMRE BEY barge set sail from Istanbul, Turkey, on June 16, 2024, bound for Ecuador, and was scheduled to arrive at the Port of Guayaquil on July 17, according to the ship locator, Vesselfinder. However, it has remained outside the Strait of Panama since July 14.
Regarding this, the Minister ruled out that the final destination was Ecuador. “The barge did leave Istanbul on June 16, but it was not bound for Ecuador in Latin America. They, as a private business, can speed up or slow down the delivery depending on the business opportunity,” Gonçalves said on Teleamazonas.
The Minister said that the Turkish barge Karpowership is in the Port of Balboa in Panama and that it would only be waiting to complete a guarantee issue before heading to Ecuador.
Karpowership’s barge, named Emre Bey, is the only power generation barge to have passed through the Panama Canal in the past month.
PRIMICIAS verified on four specialized portals for monitoring marine traffic that Emre Bey registered the Port of Guayaquil as his destination. These portals take the information that ships register in ports and radars.
In addition, the Emre Bey barge is the only one currently on the American Pacific coast.
The rest of the Karpowership fleet is distributed around the world, but is located mainly on the African coast of the Atlantic Ocean and in Europe, as verified by PRIMICIAS on Marine Traffic (a specialized radar ship tracking site).
Since July 14, Emre Bey has been moored at one of the anchors of the Panama Canal, on the Pacific Ocean side. There, it has set the port of Guayaquil as its destination.
Other Karpowership barges are in America, but further away than the current location of Emre Bey and they are in the Atlantic Ocean:
The Baris Bey barge is in Guyana, after leaving Cuba, where media in that country reported that it arrived in May to produce 36 MW for the production of a gas plant in the country.
-The Imre Bey barge is in the Dominican Republic, where Karpowership has been operating since 2023 according to its own website. It has been there for more than a month.
Zeynep Sultan, on the other hand, is off the coast of Brazil. Karpowership also has contracts in that country.
On when the barge will arrive, the Energy Minister said there is “no rush for it to come” because a transmission line is being built that will need to connect to the barge.
“Our job is to be able to get from the substation to the connection with the barge. That is not yet ready,” he added.
The barge from Turkey was previously a cargo ship. In this regard, Goncalves said that “buying a hull and reusing it is completely normal in the industry” and stressed that all the generating equipment that is part of the barge is new.
The head of the Energy portfolio explained that the value to be paid for the rental of the barge is USD 115 million, for the 18 months of the contract, although it will only be used especially during the dry season. The 18 months would begin to count from August.
Meanwhile, the price per kilowatt hour will be USD 0.14. The Minister assured that this will not imply a higher expense for the citizen for the consumption of electricity. In Ecuador, the electricity rate for the final consumer is subsidized by an average of USD 0.9 per kilowatt/hour.
By: PRIMICIAS