Singapore– The Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand Monday said it will exclude power produced from the planned project from its power development plan. Under the power development plan, EGAT was to buy at least 920 megawatts from the 1,070-MW hydropower project.

“We told them that without confirmation of the (start) day of commercial operations, we have to bring them out from the long-term plan because we have to know what is the exact (start) day,” said EGAT Governor Sittiporn Ratanopas.

An exclusion from the power development plan will mean the Nam Theun consortium will have to renegotiate the details of EGAT’s term power purchases. Additionally, the previous initial agreement on the price and amount of power to be purchased by EGAT won’t be valid.

EdF threw the status of the project in doubt when it announced in July it would be pulling out of the project following pressure from the French government. EdF is the main stakeholder in the Nam Theun project, with a 35% interest.

EGAT then set an end-September deadline for a time frame for the project, or it would drop plans to buy electricity on earlier agreed terms.

The power purchase agreement, which was to have been signed on the day EdF said it would exit the project in July, would have committed EGAT to buying at least 920 megawatts of the 995 MW Laos hopes to export to Thailand at 1.64 baht ($1=THB39.53) a kilowatt-hour starting in 2009 for 25 years.

Last week, EdF said it will recommit to the US$1.2 billion hydropower project. EdF Chairman Francois Roussely said at an earnings conference that the French government had reconsidered its position and could give EdF a green light in the coming days to participate in the Nam Theun dam.

However, EGAT still hasn’t received confirmation on the status of the project. “There has been no official confirmation from EdF to EGAT yet,” Sittiporn said. EGAT is currently reviewing its power development plan, Sittiporn added. “We have started to proceed to review the new long-term plan, and we need one month’s time to review our plan according to the new demand,” he said.

New power supply sources to replace the power that would have been supplied by the Nam Theun project will be considered, said Sittiporn.

“We still have six years’ time from now to look (for power),” he said, adding that gas-fired power generation will remain the first option, as it will not take more than five years for a gas-fired project to come onstream.

Separately, Sittiporn said EGAT received a good response to its first road show in the U.S. The “no-deal” roadshow was held Sept. 29 to Oct.

1 to promote EGAT’s planned initial share offering. “We had a very good response from the one-on-one meetings we held,” he said, adding that EGAT held about 10 such meetings with potential investors.

EGAT remains on track to be corporatized as a company by the end of this year, with a listing on the Stock Exchange of Thailand planned three months after, or by March 2004, he said.

Sittiporn declined to elaborate on details of the planned share offering. However, he said earlier that EGAT is likely to offer up to a 30% stake for its IPO, which is expected to raise around THB60 billion.

“That is the expectation from the (IPO) advisers. We have no concrete number yet, and we have to be corporatized first,” he said. EGAT produces about 50% of the electricity consumed in Thailand, with the remaining electricity sourced through small and independent power producers or purchased from Laos and Malaysia. In August, Thailand’s
peak demand stood at 17,205.20 MW, while installed capacity stood at 25,646.99 MW.

About 70% of Thailand’s electricity generation is by gas-fired power at present. Given rising electricity demand, this figure is slated to fall to around 47% by 2020 if the current capacity of gas-fired generation remains unchanged, Sittiporn said.

By 2020, another 30% of generating capacity will be added either through gas-fired or coal-fired power generation, but the ratio will be decided later, depending on which is the cheaper source of generation, he said.

Hydropower generation will fall to 5% by 2020 from 9% at present, while generation by renewable sources will remain unchanged at 6%. Coal-fired generation accounts for 15% at present, and will fall to 12% by 2020 if the current capacity remains unchanged, he said.