December 23, 2016
While the rest of the world is moving away from coal-fired power plants, Iran last week announced plans to build its first electric power generating plant fired by coal.
The plant is to be located outside Tabas, near one of the country’s few coal mines.
With Iran floating on oil and gas, the vast majority of electricity in Iran is generated by oil or gas, with some hydropower and one nuclear plant. Coal provides only a fraction of 1 percent of the energy used in Iran and none of it has been used until now to generate electricity.
Ali-Reza Nasrollahi, who will head the construction project, said the plant will be built with Iranian finance and in partnership with a Chinese company, Shanghai Electric Group Company.
The Institute for Energy Research says China and Japan are still building coal-fired power plants, while other major countries are banning new construction and shuttering many existing coal-fired power plants. Japan plans to build 43 coal-fired plants to replace its shuttered nuclear units.
It isn’t clear why Iran is building a solitary coal-fired plant, though its proximity to a coal mine may mean it makes economic, if not environmental, sense.
It will have a capacity of 650 megawatts.
According to published statistics, Iran has produced an average of about 1.3 million tons of coal annually for decades, a small amount that mostly goes to the country’s steel industry.
Pasdar angry with IRISL for building ships abroad
The Pasdaran have publicly expressed irritation with Iran’s national shipping line for contracting with a South Korean shipyard to build 10 new vessels rather than having the Pasdaran do the work.
It has even asked President Rohani to cancel the deal with the South Korean shipyard. The open question is whether it plans to throw its weight around to make sure the deal is killed.
The Pasdaran’s shipyard could probably build the small tankers that the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Line (IRISL) has ordered from Hyundai Heavy Industries, but it is unlikely to be capable of building the giant container ships IRISL has also ordered.
“They are worried about competition internally,” Alireza Nader, an analyst at the RAND Corporation, told The Associated Press. “They want to make sure, for any given deal, they get a part of it.”
The Pasdaran weren’t subtle about their opposition to the deal with South Korea.
“At a time when we are faced with the problem of youth unemployment in our country, unfortunately, we have heard that the contract to build 10 ships has been signed with South Korea, and I hope it is not true and it has not been signed yet,” Pasdar Gen. Ebadollah Abdollahi said Sunday. “Is it a lack of respect for our domestic capabilities? If it is true, we request the president to cancel this deal.”
The Pasdaran or Revolutionary Guards are not just a military outfit. At the end of the Iran-Iraq war, they were tasked to use their engineering talent to do construction work specifically to provide jobs for the soldiers being demobilized.
Today, the Pasdaran run a massive construction company, Khatam ol-Anbiya, with 135,000 employees handling civil development, oil industry work and defense projects. Pasdar firms build roads, staff ports, run telecommunication networks and even conduct laser eye surgery.
The exact scope of all its business holdings remains unclear. The Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has been critical of the nuclear deal with Iran, estimates the Pasdaran control “between 20 and 40 percent of the economy” through significant influence in at least 229 companies.
Among the firms is the Iran Marine Industrial Co., a shipbuilding and repair company. The AP said the company, known by the acronym SADRA, lost out on the IRISL contract, likely spurring Abdollahi’s comments.
Part of the Pasdar concern may stem from the oversized role it took on in Iran’s economy the past few years during sanctions, said Afshon Ostovar, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in the United States, who recently published book on the Pasdaran.
“The door is open to doing deals with the West and they don’t want those doors to be floodgates,” Ostovar said. “They want them to be a tiny little window where very discrete, deliberate transactions happen, but not just sort of a gold rush for both the West and for Iranians trying to make a buck.”
In 21st Century, Iran wants to build a coal-fired plant
While the rest of the world is moving away from coal-fired power plants, Iran last week announced plans to build its first electric power generating plant fired by coal.
The plant is to be located outside Tabas, near one of the country’s few coal mines.
With Iran floating on oil and gas, the vast majority of electricity in Iran is generated by oil or gas, with some hydropower and one nuclear plant. Coal provides only a fraction of 1 percent of the energy used in Iran and none of it has been used until now to generate electricity.
Ali-Reza Nasrollahi, who will head the construction project, said the plant will be built with Iranian finance and in partnership with a Chinese company, Shanghai Electric Group Company.
The Institute for Energy Research says China and Japan are still building coal-fired power plants, while other major countries are banning new construction and shuttering many existing coal-fired power plants. Japan plans to build 43 coal-fired plants to replace its shuttered nuclear units.
It isn’t clear why Iran is building a solitary coal-fired plant, though its proximity to a coal mine may mean it makes economic, if not environmental, sense.
It will have a capacity of 650 megawatts.
According to published statistics, Iran has produced an average of about 1.3 million tons of coal annually for decades, a small amount that mostly goes to the country’s steel industry.