Malaysian mine-mouth power plant regulation will be reissued

(Repost, from the Jakarta news)   

    The Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry will soon issue a new regulation to help lower costs for mine-mouth power plants.

    The new ministerial decree would be similar to another regulation that had capped gas prices at the wellhead to ensure lower costs for electricity producers, said the ministry's electricity director general, Jarman on Friday.

    "The mine-mouth power plant and non-mine mouth power plant rules will be issued soon to regulate [prices]," he said during a coffee morning at the electricity directorate general in South Jakarta.

     Last year, the ministry issued two ministerial decrees on mine-mouth power plants, with the later one being a revision of the one issued earlier in the year.

     The most recent ministerial decree stipulated that that the mine-mouth price of coal would be based on business-to-business negotiations between mining and electricity companies, as opposed to the fixed pricing mechanism implemented previously.

     The new decree will be a second revision of Ministerial Decree No. 9/2016.

"Electricity costs must be competitive," Jarman said.

     Coal is expected to remain a major source of electricity production in the next decade, with about 265,599 megawatts (MW) procured from the national capacity of 527,978 MW by 2025.