TEHRAN - The electricity output of Iran’s hydroelectric power plants is expected to reach 20,000 gigawatt hours (GWh) in the first half of the current Iranian calendar year (to end on September 22), four times more than the figure for last year’s same period, IRIB reported on Monday.

According to the Head of Iran Water and Power Resources Development Company (IWPC), Behrouz Moradi, a newly constructed hydroelectric power plant is also going to go on stream in near future which will add 50 megawatts to the country’s power generation capacity in its first phase of operation.

“At the second phase, the plant’s power generation capacity will reach 100 MW,” Moradi said in a press conference.

The official put the country’s hydroelectric power plants’ output in the first quarter of the current fiscal year at 4400 GWh, saying that so far IWPC has constructed over 12,020 MW capacity of hydropower plants across the country.

Last Month, Director of Iran’s Hydroelectric Power Plants Management Center Farbod Estiri said Iran’s hydroelectric power plants are expected to produce 10,500 megawatts (10.5 gigawatts) of electricity in the current Iranian calendar year (March 2019-March 2020).

According to Estiri, since the beginning of the current Iranian calendar year (March 20) up to mid-June, over 10.8 billion kilowatt hour (KWh) of electricity was produced by the country’s hydroelectric plants.

The figure was reported to be 1.8 billion KWh in the last year’s same time span.

In late April, Deputy Distribution Coordinator of Iran’s Power Generation and Distribution Company (known as TAVANIR), Mahmoud Reza Haqifam, announced that recent heavy rainfalls in Iran has increased the electricity output of the country’s hydropower plants by up to 5,000 megawatts.

According to Haqifam, in the peak consumption hours of the day, between 9,500 MW and 10,000 MW of electricity is charged to the network by hydropower plants.

Iran’s current power generation capacity stands at about 81 GW of which the share of hydroelectric power stands at 19.87 percent.

In late May, the Energy Ministry announced that it plans to inaugurate 22 new units with a total capacity of 3,933 MW in the current [Iranian calendar] year along with upgrading and increasing the efficiency of existing power plants to add another 461 MW of new capacity.

EF/MA