Tepco to restart two quake-hit oil-fired Kashima units Fri
Tokyo (Platts)--7Apr2011/632 am EDT/1032 GMT
Japan's Tokyo Electric Power Company plans to restart two oil-fired
units at its earthquake-hit Kashima thermal power plant Friday, which
would increase its total power supply capacity to 40.5 GW, company
officials said Thursday.
Tepco is restarting the 600 MW No.2 oil-fired unit and the 1 GW No.5
oil-fired unit at Kashima, but its No.5 unit will initially be running
at 50% of capacity, which would provide the combined 1.1 GW electricity
supply, the officials said.
Tepco's latest restart of the two oil-fired units comes after it had
restarted Wednesday its 600 MW No. 3 oil-fired unit at the Kashima plant
on the east coast of Japan having failed to restart the unit Tuesday,
the officials said.
Even after the restart of the Kashima No.3 unit, Tepco's power
generation capacity stood at around 39.4 GW Wednesday because the
company had lowered capacity from other sources such as hydropower, the
officials said.
Tepco is restarting the March 11 earthquake-hit units and thermal power
generation units after scheduled maintenance in a bid to hike power
generation capacity by 7.6 GW by the end of July.
With that expected restoration of capacity, Tepco now estimates that it
will be able to hike its electricity supply capacity to 46.5 GW by the
end of July, when the country will be in the middle of the summer power
demand season.
Meanwhile, the Petroleum Association of Japan president Akihiko Tembo
told reporters April 1 that Tepco's incremental oil demand this summer
as a result of its nuclear outage would be limited.
Speaking at a press conference in Tokyo, Tembo said that it was unlikely
that the Japanese oil industry would see an immediate hike in
incremental oil demand from Tepco because its earthquake and tsunami-hit
Hirono thermal power plant will not come back on stream in the near
future.
Pointing to Tepco's nuclear outage at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear
power plant in the wake of a strong earthquake in 2007, Tembo said that
the local oil industry faced a surge in oil demand from Tepco because
the Hirono thermal power plant was operating.
But while Tepco has named the 1.6 GW oil-fired Hirono plant as one of
its thermal power plants, it has not included it in its list of thermal
power plants expected to be restarted by the end of July.
--Takeo Kumagai,
takeo_kumagai@platts.com
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